From the Vault: The Toaster Not Taken

It’s obvious that our preferences guide our choices, but do our choices also determine our preferences? In this classic episode, join Robert and Joe as they explore this question with the help of a half-century of psychological research and reminiscences concerning Sonic the Hedgehog and Metallica. (originally published 12/24/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Land and I'm Joe McCormick in. Today's episode is
from the Vault. This one originally published on December and
it is called The Toaster Not Taken. This one is
about a classic finding in psychology that I remember getting
really obsessed with at this time, about how our choices

(00:26):
can later determine our actual preferences. So yeah, this one
was a lot of fun. I remember we ended up
talking a good bit about Metallica for some reason. Yes
we did. Yes, all right, Well let's let's let's dive
in Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow

(00:53):
your Mind. My name is Robert Land and I'm Joe
McCormick in. Today we're gonna be talking about choices and offerences,
and I wanted to start off by looking at what
I think is one of the most commonly misunderstood poems
in English literature. It's a classic most Americans already know.
You probably read it at some point in high school

(01:14):
or even earlier. But it's an interesting poem because I
think it usually gets interpreted to mean the exact opposite
of what it actually means. So this is the road
not taken by Robert Frost. Are you ready to hear
it again? Yeah? Yeah, This is always a pleasure to
to hear or to read, even though it's one that
I think we're all hit with a lead, probably at

(01:36):
the elementary school level, you know. I I feel like
I came to a greater appreciation of just the music
of Robert Frost's poems as an adult than than I
had for them when I was in school. So I'm
not sure exactly what changed there. Maybe I became grumpier,
and he was quite a grump himself. But but here
we go. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and

(01:59):
sorry I would not travel both and be one traveler long.
I stood and looked down one as far as I
could to where it bent in the undergrowth, then took
the other, as just as fair and having perhaps the
better claim, because it was grassy and wanted, where though
as for that, the passing there had warned them really

(02:19):
about the same, and both that morning equally lay in
leaves no step had trodden black. Oh. I kept the
first for another day, yet, knowing how way leads onto way,
I doubted. If I should ever come back, I shall
be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages.
Hence two roads diverged in a wood, and I I

(02:42):
took the one less traveled by, and that has made
all the difference. It's a beautiful bomb, it really is.
But one of the things that that is really funny
is that I think people usually interpret this poem as
a sort of sellabration of unique individuality and a celebration

(03:04):
of going your own way. It's about how if you
go boldly where others have not gone before, if you
remain your unique, authentic self and choose the stranger path,
you'll be rewarded with a life of unique meaning. But
if you read it closely, I think the poem is
meant to be a quite ironic sort of perry against

(03:25):
exactly that way of thinking, because what happens in it, well,
the speaker comes to a fork in the road. The
speaker evaluates the for each path for a bit, at
first thinks one is more traveled than the other, but
then ultimately realizes that they're about the same, then takes
one road rather than the other for no major reason.

(03:45):
They are in reality pretty much indistinguishable, then thinks about
how later in life he'll be claiming that he took
the bold, untraveled path and that it changed his life,
even though that wasn't true. Yeah, I feel like that's
something that a lot of people miss out on in
the poem, and I think a lot of it sometimes
comes down to um the discussions about what is he

(04:07):
actually talking about, and people get very wrapped up in that,
like what was the choice? No, no, no, not the
walk in the woods? What were you actually talking about?
Frost and and then you you kind of end up
ignoring the mechanics of it that you're talking about here. Well, yeah,
because I think this is in a way a sort
of an image poem that can be applied to many
different types of choices one makes in life. Though I

(04:28):
think it was literally inspired by him walking in the
woods in New England. I'm not positive about that, but
I think I've read that before. But yeah, So it's
essentially a poem about a person who chose at random
between two at the time pretty much indistinguishable options, and
then comes up later with an ex post facto justification

(04:49):
for his choice that it was the one made you know,
made out of daring an authentic principle and that it
was deeply meaningful. And I really like this ironic interpret
station because it raises a number of really interesting questions
about human nature. So, first of all, isn't so much
of life like this? We do make life changing decisions

(05:11):
without knowing what the outcome will be. That the options
in front of us might look indistinguishable. At the time
you choose between two job opportunities, you can't really tell
that one is necessarily better than the other. But then
later you you will have had much of your life
developed on the basis of whichever choice you made, and

(05:31):
you have to come up with a narrative of your
life story that makes sense of that choice in light
of its later unpredictable significance. And obviously, when you do
this a lot of times you're gonna end up remembering
the choice differently than it was in your mind when
you made it. But then it also raises an interesting
question about decision making. In the moment. When there are

(05:52):
two options that are pretty much the same, we we
often have to form a preference for one or the other. Now,
there are plenty of cases where you can quite clearly
see why you'd prefer one option over another. But in
cases where that's not true, in the absence of the
obvious superiority of one option over another, where do our

(06:13):
preferences arise from? Why do we decide we like the
left path rather than the right path if they look
about the same. And for the purpose of today's episode,
I want to expand beyond thinking about paths in the
woods or big life decisions when it comes to the
formation of any preferences, even extremely minor ones. You know,
you choose between two basically equivalent brands of blender at

(06:36):
the store. Why do we like the things that we like?
Why do we have the preferences that we have. I'm
probably gonna refer back to the Black Mirrorum episode the
Black Mirror movie Band or Snatch a lot in this one.
We did an episode about it last year, breaking down
you know, the nature of choice and free will and all.
But like I instantly think about the early stages of

(06:59):
Band or Snatch. Where as you do this choose your
own adventure media, you have to choose which cereal the
main character is going to have for breakfast, and you know,
ultimately it doesn't really matter in the context of that
of that story. Uh, And it's it's more about just
teaching the mechanics of choice within this um you know,
computer narrative. But but it's interesting that you still have

(07:23):
to exert a certain amount of mental energy to make
that choice, to decide this serial over that one. And
it's interesting how and this will tie into something we'll
talk about in just a minute here. It's interesting how,
at least for me, those early choices are kind of uncomfortable.
When you have to pick the cereal or you have
to pick the record or something, and you don't have
a natural strong preference one way or another. You've got

(07:44):
this kind of weird anxiety that lingers after your choice,
like I don't know that I pick the right one. Yeah,
because later on you can definitely make a call like okay,
this is the more dramatic choice, or well this is
the more this is the moral choice. But in choosing
the two cereals, aside from maybe health concerns about the
sugary cereal versus the other cereal, there's not as much

(08:04):
to go on, right. So one of the main things
I want to talk about in this episode today is
a really interesting fact that's been observed in a bunch
of psychology studies over the years, and I'm gonna look
at an early one from the nineteen fifties in just
a minute. Here, we often assume that our preferences are
what determine our choices. I pick this option instead of

(08:26):
that because I like it better. But there is also
significant evidence here's your AUNTI metaboli, that our choices determine
our preferences. I like this option because I picked it. Uh.
And one of the big early studies here, a classic
study that was in the Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology in nineteen fifty six by Jack W. Brim is

(08:48):
called post decision changes in the Desirability of Alternatives. So
so again, this is by the American psychologist Jack W. Brim.
Brim had been a student of the highly influential American
social psychologist Leon Festinger, who is probably best known for
developing the theory of cognitive dissonance. Now, this is a

(09:09):
term you've probably all heard before, but a lot of
people don't know the experimental history surrounding it. So the
simple version is that cognitive dissonance is the state of
holding contradictory beliefs or values, or contradictions between your beliefs
and your values and your actions observing these contradictions within

(09:30):
yourself simultaneously. So one example that's very often sided is
knowing that smoking cigarettes is harmful to your health, but
smoking them anyway. But there there can be all kinds
of cognitive dissonance. Our life is just full of of
of cognitive dissonance. You know, you believe that your spouse
is a good person, but you also know that they

(09:52):
did something wrong. You know that they stole money out
of the church collection plate or something. I think one
that's probably very common appearances. You love your child, but
you really honestly don't like something they did. You know,
you hate the way their crayon drawings look or something. Uh.
And and when you're faced with this kind of contradiction,
and of course we're faced with these kind of contradictions

(10:13):
all the time, Uh, there is a problem that arises.
What Festinger argued was that the state of cognitive dissonance
is experienced internally as a profound stress, and people will
do almost anything to alleviate that stress. And so this
this remedial action to to alleviate the stress can take

(10:33):
many forms, but it's just some finding some way to
resolve the contradiction. Really anything that reduces the internal perception
of a contradiction between beliefs and values and actions. So
if you're going back to the classic example of a
person who smokes cigarettes but who is aware of the
dangers of tobacco, they have options including they could they

(10:55):
could change their actions so you can actually quit smoking.
But of course that one is really hard, so a
lot of people would instead go for one of the
other options, which is change explicit beliefs. You can say, uh, yeah,
what are these doctors know? You know, doctors are wrong
about stuff all the time. I don't know, nobody ever
really proved that smoking causes cancer. That's you know, the

(11:19):
these studies are Can you really trust these studies? And
on and on you you can you can just say no,
I don't believe that the risks are real, or you
could change other types of beliefs, such as changing underlying
beliefs that are going unspoken, because if there's an internal conflict,
if there's cognitive dissonance arising over smoking, it relies on

(11:41):
the unspoken premise that you want to live as long
and be as healthy as possible. So you could relieve
cognitive dissonance by explicitly rejecting that belief. And you've probably
heard this before from people who say, like, yeah, I smoke,
Yeah it causes cancer, but hey, who wants to live forever?
That's also you know, a great example of of short
term versus long term thinking, right exactly. I mean, I

(12:03):
think there are ways of looking at things like. I mean,
on one hand, like you know, people are free to
to make the decisions about their own health as they choose.
But I think there is a legitimate school of thought
that would say that, uh, making statements like that is
basically a lack of compassion for your own future self. Yeah,
but statements like that can help resolve the dissonance. Uh.

(12:25):
There there are other things people do to People can
think of compensatory reasons that they would keep smoking. So
they might say, Okay, I I accept the fact that
smoking is bad for health. I keep doing it, but
I've got some like compensatory justification in my brain. I
need to smoke in order to stay focused at work,

(12:45):
or like I need to smoke in order to stay thin,
or or things like that. And so people have argued
about how best to interpret cognitive dissonance theory and and
they've argued around the margins over the years, but it
seems to me like cognitive dissonance is pretty robust and
a very lasting concept from from social psychology that explains

(13:06):
a lot of our behaviors and cognitive processes. There's been
a ton of different experiments that seem to support the
idea of cognitive dissonance reduction is a major pressure driving
our beliefs and behaviors. Just one I was reading about
as a study by Festinger and Carl Smith from nineteen
fifty nine that works something like this. So you have

(13:26):
people perform something that they believe to be the actual
bulk of the experiment. It's this like long, repetitive, extremely
boring task I don't remember exactly what it is. Is like,
you know, you put these pegs in holes for an
hour or something is mind numbingly boring, and then you
pay the subjects after they're done with the experiment to

(13:48):
tell the people who are going in to do it
next that it's really fun and interesting. Uh so they're
gonna be lying, They're gonna be openly saying something that
they know not to be true. And Festinger and Carl
Smith found something interesting which is that if you pay
people a larger sum of money to tell this lie,
they will they will afterwards acknowledge it as a lie. So,

(14:11):
you know, you give me a hundred bucks or whatever.
I think it was twenty dollars in the study, but
that was nineteen fifties money. You give me a hundred
bucks or something. I say like, yeah, you know, I
I lied to the next guy. I told him it
was going to be really fun. If you pay somebody
a pittance sum to tell the lie, you give them
just a dollar, they are more likely afterwards to report

(14:31):
believing that what they said was true. So you give
somebody a hundred dollars to say this is really putting
the pegs in the holes is really fun. They say, yeah,
I was lying, but hey, I gotta pay day. You
pay people a dollar to say it, and they say,
actually putting the pegs in the holes was pretty fun.
And the reasoning here is that, in the absence of

(14:53):
a large sum of money to internally justify the lie
in order to basically relieve the cognitive dissonance, give you
a reason and in your mind for having said it.
The easiest way for people to reduce cognitive dissonance is
to change their beliefs, change what they believe about what
they were doing, so that what they were saying actually
wasn't a lie, it was true. Yeah. But yeah, the
pigs and the holes. It's great. Yeah, I um, I

(15:16):
agree with what you said said earlier. I think this
helps to explain a lot of what goes on in
our heads, cognitive dissonance, both specifically as it applies to
contradictory opinions and beliefs that that we we hold at
once in our minds, as well as just more broadly
getting it the lack of a congruent self. You know, Yeah,
because I mean human life, You're you're just gonna be

(15:36):
full of contradictions. I mean, there is no way a
human can be consistent all the time. Uh, You're you're
going to have pressures that are acting on your mind
and going in multiple directions and and most of the
time these contradictions can exist within you without you really
being aware of them. But once you become aware of them,
I am pretty convinced that, Yeah, it does manifest as
this type of stress that you've got to do something

(15:59):
about it. Yeah, Like you often see people using sort
of like self defining mantras, you know, like I am
this first, this second, this third, or you know I
am this and this and this or you know, you
define yourself and your your profile on social media as
being as being this or that or the other. But
you know, ultimately, if we're being honest, a lot of

(16:21):
times it depends on on what time of day it is,
when we last had a little boost of sugar caffeine.
You know, how tired we are, um, how much sunlight
we've been exposed to during the day, that's sort of thing,
how much exercise we've had. Uh, those are some just
some of the factors that can influence the ranking of
those little um uh, those little phrases that we used

(16:43):
to define ourselves and and and even incorporating different phrases
that we might not we not not have on the list,
uh normally or certainly when we're you know, outward facing
and dealing with other people. Yeah, a lot of a
lot of our lives are concerned with trying to create
a consistent narrative about ourselves, and in fact ourselves they're
just not that consistent. Yeah, and been really now, I mean,

(17:05):
neither is our understanding of the past, our memory of
the past or anything. I mean, it it's just it's
it's so ridiculous the more you unravel it, Like, we
were so obsessed with our our personal narratives and where
we fit into it, when in reality, there is no past,
you know, we are we are creatures of the present,
traveling into the future. And uh and yet we end up,

(17:26):
you know, spending all this time fretting about things that
are essentially fiction because all we have is just this, uh,
this cople together false memory of what we were. Uh.
This ties back to previous episodes that we've done on
the phenomenon of fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people
to overestimate the role of like internal agency and character

(17:50):
and underestimate the role of just external situations and forces
in guiding what human behavior is. It turns out people
are more malleable and more changeable based on situations than
we normally like to think. We like to think in
terms of like, you know, consistent solid psychological storytelling where
John snow always stands for right and he just always

(18:10):
does what is perfectly consistent with his character and it's
explained by who he is. But in fact, what we
do a lot of times is just explained by what's
going on around us. But anyway, to come back to
the cognitive dissonance question, one implication of cognitive dissonance is that,

(18:33):
in fact, our beliefs are quite malleable. When beliefs are
dissonant with one another, it looks like, you know, it's
people don't want to think this about themselves, but it
seems to be true. We quite often and quite readily
just change one of our beliefs. We just believe something
different to get him in line. So anyway, the study
by Jack Brim looked at the question of whether cognitive

(18:55):
dissonance might be a motivator even when people are evaluating
their own preferences, their own personal desires, just likes and dislikes,
even with regards to very minor things like do you
like this appliance or not? How much do you like it?
So the basics of the study, you present people with

(19:16):
a selection of different household items and appliances ranging in
retail value for from fifteen dollars to thirty dollars, but
that was at the time that teen fifties dollars um
And then you asked the people to rate each of
these items in terms of desirability, how much would you
would you like to own this item on a scale
of one to ten, from extremely desirable to definitely not

(19:38):
desirable at all or sorry, I think I said one
to tend it's one to eight, um, so you know
you really want the eights, you don't really care about
the ones. Uh. And the items included things like an
automatic coffee maker and electric sandwich grill, a silk screen
reproduction and automatic toaster, a fluorescent desk lamp, a book

(19:59):
of art reproduction, a stop watch, and a portable radio.
And so, if I'm subject in this experiment, I go
down the list, I do my ratings. I might rate
the stop watch at a three out of ten, I
don't really care about that much, maybe the sandwich grill
at a five, the coffee maker at a six, etcetera.
And then after I'm finished with my ratings and they're

(20:19):
taken away, the experiment er tells me that as part
of my payment for participating, I'll get to take home
my choice of one of two items from the list.
But the experiment or picks what the two are. So
maybe he tells me that I can take home either
the toaster or the coffee maker, which I rated equally,

(20:39):
giving both a six. But I have to pick one,
so I picked the coffee maker and I reject the toaster.
Then some other conditions take place. Uh, there were various
other control conditions, but the experiment ends at some point
with ME re rating the original objects again for desirability
without being able to refer to the things I had

(21:00):
already made. And what the researchers found was, on average,
if I was forced to pick between two objects, my
desirability rating for the object I picked would go up,
and my rating for the object I rejected would go down.
So maybe I initially rated the toaster and the coffee
maker both as a six. But then if I'm forced

(21:22):
to pick between them and I picked the coffee maker, afterwards,
I might rate the coffee maker is a seven and
the toaster is a four or something like that. Now
why would that be? Yeah, this is interesting because one
of one of the possible examples that came to mind
when I was thinking about this was to go back
to a previous episode that we recorded, thinking about how,

(21:42):
you know, back when when I was younger, you had,
you know, like maybe twenty bucks to blow on a
CD during the course of a month, and you made
your pick, you bought it, and then even if it
wasn't that great, you kind of found found a reason
to like that album as you listen to it over
and over again, you found at least one song. But
in those cases, you have sunk cost in the situation,

(22:04):
like I spent money on it um in addition to time,
whereas in this scenario, uh, it's there. Their money is
not the issue. There's like I guess there's sort of
a sunk cost in time, but we don't have that
that financial aspect of the scenario, right, so the sunk
cost fallacy does seem to be real, Like we make

(22:24):
choice supportive, biased judgments in favor of stuff that we've
already invested time and money and all that into. But
here it's just like, well, you're gonna get one or
the other. Which one do you want? And it seems
like once you pick one out of the two, the
one you didn't pick looks like junk, and the one
you did pick, oh that's pretty great. I do find this.
I think, you know, there's just you know, me thinking

(22:46):
back on past experiences, But I feel like this with
ice creams sometimes, like Ultimately, most of the ice creams
at the n Ice ice cream place, you know they're
gonna be great. I'm gonna enjoy them. They're just gonna
be varying degrees of sweetness and uh, you know, complex
flay or I guess. But I'll often find myself thinking,
like you know, afterwards, I I'm there with my family,
will all, you know, sample each other's ice creams, and

(23:07):
I'll generally go, Yep, I made the right choice. This
is the ice cream for me. Yep. Now there could
be multiple reasons for that. One reason is extremely straightforward.
One reason is you just picked the one you actually
wanted most. You know what your preferences are and you
acted them out. But there could be Yeah, there could
be other things at work too, And so the underlying

(23:28):
explanation based on cognitive dissonance for what was observed in
the study, It goes something like this. When you evaluate
how much you want to potential possessions, you think in
a general way about the pros and cons of each,
What do you like about them? What do you dislike
about them? Then, if you are forced to choose between
two options for which you see roughly similar amounts of pros,

(23:50):
and cons it creates one of these mildly stressful states
of cognitive dissonance. And again that sounds funny because like,
how could that be stressful? But it looks like this
just does manifest a stress in our brains, even though
it doesn't really make a lot of sense that it would.
So you didn't choose the toaster, even though there are
things that you like about the toaster, etcetera. And this

(24:12):
uncomfortable state of cognitive dissonance has a name actually, when
it's applied to expensive purchases, when you've spent money on it,
it's known as buyer's remorse. Right, Okay, I need to
buy a lawnmower, But you know, what the hell do
I know about lawnmowers. I can't tell one from the other.
They cost a lot of money, but I need one,
and I can't really tell them apart. So I'm just
gonna have to pick one of these here at the

(24:33):
store and buy it so I can cut the grass.
But after you've made a purchase like this, okay, big
dollar item, you've spent a lot on it, you you
just picked one, people often experience a sinking feeling. This
form of stress and psychological discomfort did I buy the
right one? And you think about what might have been
good about the ones you didn't buy, and you think

(24:55):
about what might be wrong with the one you did buy.
So to eliminate the stress of this dissonance, the theory
goes that your brain simply changes your beliefs. You change
your beliefs about what you prefer and what you want,
emphasizing the pros and de emphasizing the cons of the
option you chose, and vice versa for the option you rejected.

(25:17):
And it makes sense in a weird way, right, I mean,
we often think of that our beliefs should be these
these core and just fix things about ourselves, you know.
Uh that you know, although the wind and the raging
of the world just move around. But uh, you know,
from from the mind standpoint, it's like, well, uh, this
is causing a problem. Let's let's change this circuit here
because we're getting some some feedback that that is not

(25:40):
optimal for the system. Right. Um. Now, I will note that,
of course, as always, these these results apply on average,
and it's interesting to think about other ways that some
people might reduce cognitive dissonance in this kind of situation
without changing their original preferences without changing their opinions about
what's desirable. I think one very common adaptive strategy is

(26:03):
the adaptive strategy of internally de emphasizing the importance of possessions,
which in fact, in reality, which you know moment to moment,
reduces the cognitive dissonance that arises from making choices about possessions. Yeah,
sort of realizing, well, lawnmowers don't really matter. It doesn't.

(26:23):
It's just the thing, and I'm going to spend a
certain amount on it. It's just I'm gonna spend what
it costs. I'm gonna get whichever one is just easiest
to obtain. In the smoking example, I think this is
kind of the This is equivalent to the like who
wants to live forever option, but thinking about you know,
consumer items instead of your life, Like, I'm not reckless
with my health, I'm just very zen about this whole

(26:45):
smoking thing, right, I think it makes more sense to
try to do the zen path about the lawnmower material possessions.
But hey, I mean that's hard. I mean we shouldn't
just like blithely say everybody should do that, But I
mean it's difficult to do that. People you're spending your money,
that is your labor. You're you're thinking, oh God, did
I did I get it right? Um and And the

(27:06):
same even manifest when you're just making a decision about
what appliance you want to take home after spending an
afternoon doing an experiment. Um and. And I should also
note that there have been some competing explanations for this phenomenon,
but it seems like cognitive dissonance is favored by the
experts and supported by a lot of other experiments. Um. So,
I wanted to note in this experiment there were a

(27:26):
couple of interesting control conditions and additional hypotheses tested that
ended up not receiving support from the data, So I'm
not going to get into those, but I did want
to mention one control condition, the gift condition, and this
provides an interesting variation on what they found. So there
is some indication that owning something makes people see that

(27:47):
thing as more desirable. So what if it was the
effect of ownership of this appliance they received that made
the difference, rather than reduction of cognitive dissonance arising from
your choices. Well, to control for that in this gift condition,
the subject did not get to choose which item they
would receive. It was just picked for them and given

(28:08):
as a gift by by the experiment er. And what
Brim found is that this control condition did not produce
effects to challenge the main finding. So it really did
look like, at least from this experiment, that people's ratings
were actually changed by the choices they made, and not
just by feelings associated with ownership or feelings from what

(28:29):
you're taking home. It wasn't the fact that you have
the coffee maker that makes it seem better. It was
the fact that you chose it. You know, when this
is this gets more complicated, and perhaps it's it's looked
at more in the appropriate literature surrounding it. But I'm
instantly reminded of some of the advertising mechanics that have
encountered recently on YouTube where I'm watching a show that

(28:50):
that I that we regularly watch, and then I'll instead
of just being served an ad, I get served a
little choice that says, which of the following ads would
you like to risk? Steve most I wonder if that
is a mechanic that's playing into some of this. Oh yes,
so like if you choose it, maybe the ideas you'll
actually be uh less resentful of the ad and more

(29:11):
likely to pay attention to it and listen all the
way through. I wonder, Yeah, maybe, because I know the
choice is never like, um, it's never a wonderful like
an easy choice. It's not like do you want to
see an ad for the new Star Wars TV show?
Or do you want to watch an insurance commercial? Now,
it's always like which insurance commercial would you like to watch? Well,
it's got to be the one with that really nice lady.

(29:34):
Was one with a really nice lady who's always really nice? Oh? Yeah,
I guess I like the weird ones, give me the
give me the real yeah, the gecko ones c g
I gecko, Yeah, make me not realize it was for
insurance and and never think twice about what the product
actually was. Okay, So, just to read the top line
from the conclusion of brim study quote, the results supported

(29:55):
the prediction that choosing between alternatives would create dissonance, and
it tempts to reduce it by making the chosen alternative
more desirable and the unchosen alternative less desirable. Yeah. This
reminds me of another paper, Joe, that I think you're
familiar with Love the one You're with by Stephen Stills
at All. Yep, when you know when you're down, when

(30:17):
you're confused and you don't remember how you rated the
items originally now uh more. Seriously though, I'm not sure
if this completely sticks, but I instantly looking over all this,
I started thinking about the still relevant divide over gaming systems.

(30:37):
So back when I was a kid, Like the first
major choice I think I had to make because I
was an ne Ne Ne s kid, and then came the
choice Super a ne S or Saga Genesis, and then
eventually later comes to PlayStation Xbox Divide, and I think
that's that's still very much alive today. But but basically,
you know, one often has to make a choice which

(30:58):
prices system they're going to vest in. And this also
impacts certain console exclusives, right like, if you're a Nintendo White,
then you're gonna get Mario and so you can end
up on Team Mario. If you're a Sagatarian, then you're
gonna you're gonna be a follower of Saint Sonic the
Hedgehog and may you know, maybe Saint Alter Beast. Xbox
you're gonna get Gears of War in Halo PlayStation, you're

(31:20):
gonna get Gods of War and or God of War
whatever it was, and the last Office so um. You know,
on on one level, on like a very rational level,
you engage with in some decision making You're like, well, uh,
I know this franchise as a console exclusive, I'm gonna
go this direction. But in other cases I do looking back,

(31:41):
I do find myself having engaged in some of that,
you know, like I didn't really have a huge opinion
on the whole Mario Sonic divide, and yet I found
at times someone like today we'll bring up Mario and
Sonic can be like, oh, well, you know, Mario was cool,
but Sonic was a bit lame. Sonic was a bit
a bit of a poo a Pucci, and I realistically

(32:03):
have to agree with them. But I have this impulse
to defend Sonic because I was a Saga player, because
I had the Saga Genesis, and even though I didn't
really love Sonic the Hedgehog like he was, still I
was still on that team, you know. So I'm still
reeling from Sonic being a Pucci, which I think is
highly accurate. I'm sorry it is, no I I agree,
I rationally agree with you, but I have this irrational response,

(32:26):
this knee jerk reaction to defend him for some reason,
even though I I never completed a Sonic game and
ultimately don't have a real strong opinion on Sonic versus Mario.
I didn't. I played both of them at some point
or another, and I didn't particularly you know, I don't
really rationally love one more than the other. Yeah, I mean,
I think ideas like which video game console you buy

(32:49):
that that goes in the same direction as a lot
of these sort of like consumer options that people choose between.
We're I think clearly like both kinds of considerations are
going to be feeding in. Like there are some just
gin you and preference differences, like you can look at
like which games you can get on each one and
have a genuine desire to play one more than the other.
But then there's also probably some choice supportive bias kicking

(33:10):
in and how you retrospectively think about making the choice
and which one you'd like better. And I guess I
should say that a less favored but also possibly viable
explanation for for this phenomenon um, like observed in brim study,
is known as self perception theory. Basically, this is an
alternative to cognitive dissonance theory that comes down to the

(33:31):
principle that people form their internal perceptions of the self
by observing external actions. So how do you decide what
your preferences are? Will you actually decide them by observing
what you choose? And so if this were the correct interpretation,
this would also explain choice induced preference change, which is

(33:53):
what the phenomenon would come to be known as choice
induced preference change. You make the choice and that changes
is retrospectively what you think your preferences are. And Brim's
results have been replicated many times across many studies. Uh,
there are there are some disagreements, but it appears to
me to be a pretty solid conclusion that not only

(34:14):
do our preferences influence our choices, but our choices really
do influence our preferences. And this probably happens in both
positive and negative directions. So again, just like in that
first study, our preferences for options that we choose increase
and our preferences for options that we reject decrease. And
I think the second condition is especially interesting. It explains

(34:37):
something that I've often observed anecdotally that so many things
in life are once discarded despised. Almost as soon as
you have committed to rejecting an option, you can suddenly
think of all kinds of reasons why that option was bad. Anyway,
The cons just boil up into your brain. Yeah, this

(34:58):
is interesting. Um. I thought about this in terms of
video games, but then I think I thought of an
even better example, and that is, um, the music of Metallica.
So so I'm I'm I. I always try to be
a polite person about things that I like and what
things other people like. So you know, if at any
point someone was to come up to me and be like, hey,

(35:20):
I'm really excited about Metallica or you know, I'm listening
to this old Metallic album where I'm trying to have
this new Metallic album, I would probably be like, oh, yeah, yeah,
Metallica is cool. But if I if I'm being if
I'm being honest, like there was there was a time
in my life where I was super into Metallica. I
was like, you know, discovering those those albums for the
first time, you know, you know, you know, Ride the

(35:41):
Lightning and so forth. For me. Eighth ninth grade for me,
that was like Metallica City. Yeah, yeah, it was. I
think I was. I was maybe just starting college or
maybe I was finishing high school when I really started
getting into them. But it was like, you know, everything
from the Black album prior. I was like, this is
amazing and um, and then at some point I was like, uh,

(36:04):
basically I less. I stopped listening to them for a
very long time, and then more recently I've started listening
to them again and and that's like the realistic read
on it. But on some level, I do feel like
when I discarded Metallica, I was like, yeah, Metallica kind
of sucks, Like those guys are jerks. Uh, they're newer
stuff is not any good? You know, all these various
things you kind of heap onto the pile, which is

(36:26):
ridiculous because hey, I used to really like them, and
then I would have to like current me would have
to point out to then me, you're going to like
them again. There's gonna be a come of time in
where you suddenly start streaming a bunch of old Metallica
albums again, and uh, and it's not gonna make sense
with this current rejection of them is a is a

(36:48):
is a is a musical entity. This is really funny
because just this week I started listening to their first
two albums again. Oh cool. I wonder why that happened.
Is there something in common that did this come up
in a previous talk we had at I don't think
we've really talked about Metauga recently. I mean it comes
up time to time, metal serendipity. I I find very

(37:08):
interesting that I love the stupid ideology of their early albums,
which there is presumed to be some kind of great
conflict over the concept of metal. And one of the
things that's great about early early albums within a genre
is that they're often very much about the genre. So like,
you know, like early rock music is all about what

(37:30):
rocking is and instructing you to rock. Uh. They're like
early rap songs that are about rapping and about and
telling people how to wrap. And they're early metal albums
that are very much all about metal, and Metallica's early
albums are are all about the concept of metal and
what it means to fight in the metal wars. I
love this, Yeah, I have a big I really love

(37:51):
house music as well. And of course there's so many
different types of house music, so listen to but I
still have a very warm place for house music that
informs you that this is house music. We have a
voice telling you you are listening to house music, and
I'm like, that's great. I don't get enough music that
is very explicit about the genre that I'm listening to.
That's excellent. I wonder what age a genre mostly stops

(38:15):
being about the concept of itself as a genre is,
Like metal today isn't usually very much about the concept
of metal, like early thresh metal was. Yeah, I don't know.
I guess it just evolves to a certain certain point. Um. Now,
of course, in all of this, you know not to
get too far off the point here. I think also,
you have that kind of like evan flow of nostalgia, right,

(38:35):
So the thing you're into, then you get out of,
and then you can reach a point where you look
back on it fondly and get back into it at
least some degree. But it's funny because I went through
a cycle that exactly mirrors yours. Like I liked them
when I was younger, and then after once I stopped
listening to them. Wasn't a deliberate choice. I just kind
of moved on to other things, and then I look
back on music that I used to listen to and

(38:57):
don't listen to anymore, and often feel this, uh, this
this kind of sting, this thing like Okay, I mean,
I guess what's probably very much going on is I
don't listen to it. I'm supporting that choice to not
listen to it by changing my beliefs about it and
deciding that it's dumb. Anyway, thank you, thank you. Now,

(39:22):
following up from Brim's original study in the fifties, like
I said, there have been a bunch of replications, but
there have also been some interesting questions. Like one study
I was looking at investigated something about the methodology of
the test, so it was it was trying to see
if the results stand up to challenges to Brim's original method.
And the paper I was looking at here was by

(39:43):
Tally Shiro, Christina M. Velasquez, and Raymond J. Dolan, published
in Psychological Science in two thousand ten called do Decisions
Shape Preference? Evidence from Blind Choice? Now, this was pretty interesting.
So the authors here begin by noting some papers all
the ones I saw were associated with their researcher named
mk Chen that noticed a potential problem with Brem's method

(40:07):
such that it could be telling us something different than
what we think it does. And the critique goes like
this in Uh, in the author's chirou at all's words
here quote, people's preferences cannot be measured perfectly and are
subject to rating noise. Okay, true, As participants gain experience
with the rating scale, they will provide more accurate ratings,

(40:31):
such that post choice shifts in ratings simply reflect the
unmasking of the participants initial preferences, which can be predicted
by their choices, rather than reflecting any changes in preference
induced by the choice. Uh So does that make sense? Basically?
I think what they're saying is that maybe when people

(40:51):
change their desirability ratings of two things that are initially
similar after being forced to pick one or the other,
what's happening is not an ex post facto reevaluation of
their preferences. But people are just getting better with successive
tries at expressing their genuine, pre existing preferences on the
rating scale used in the experiment. It seems like a

(41:13):
reasonable critique that that would be worth looking into. Yeah. Yeah,
and I think we can all see examples of that
or find examples of that where you're just like, well,
I was trying out this one musical genre, it turns
out they just won my thing. Or like I think
back on video games and I'm like, yeah, I eventually
realized I'm just not good at real time strategy games.
I just don't like them as much they don't. It's
just not my deal, right, So it would be that

(41:36):
the actual preferences in the beginning were what was revealed
in the second rating, and you're just getting better at
expressing them rather than changing them. So the authors of
this two thousands ten studies tried to design an experiment
that couldn't be subject to that problem, and what they
came up with was what they called a blind choice
model as opposed to a free choice model. So what's

(41:58):
the difference. Well, in a free choice model, again, remember
you would rate a number of options according to your preference.
Then you'd be forced to choose between some subset of them.
Then later you rate the options again. In this study,
what was different was that people didn't know what two
options from the list they were choosing between until they
had made their choice. So you're given a hypothetical list

(42:22):
of vacation destinations, and you rate them in terms of
how much you'd like to go there for a vacation,
so you know, Rome, Cairo, et cetera. Then after the
initial rating task, you are asked to choose blindly between
a binary subset for a hypothetical vacation, but you can't
see what they are. Is you have option A and
option B, but the actual locations are hidden, and you

(42:45):
choose one. Once you choose between them, the options are
then revealed, so it's like, oh, so it seems you've
picked Making instead of Tuscany or whatever. Uh, And and
then once it's all over, you will be asked to
rate the options again. So so does that makes sense
that you can't see what the options are. You're just
making a choice without any information at all. It is
complete blind choice. And they also included a couple of

(43:08):
control conditions where a computer made the decision for people,
so you don't get to make a choice at all,
to see if the perception of personal agency was important
even though the choice was made blind. And it's not
just a case of like picking a door and then
what's behind door number three? Because at least in that
scenario you picked three but in this there's like a
robot game show host that as you walk up and

(43:31):
then it just says you're getting a toaster, right, you
get what's behind door number three? Uh, that that's the
difference there. And so what did the study find? Quote,
We found that preferences were altered after participants made a
blind choice, but not when a computer instructed the participants decision.
The results suggests that just as preferences form choices, choices

(43:53):
shape preferences. So this is confirming to some degree Brem's
original results. It looks like, yes, these atias have not
merely been tracking how people get better at assigning ratings
to their pre existing preferences. What people want and prefer
really does seem to change so that it falls in
line with what they have already chosen. And this study

(44:14):
also reveals this very interesting wrinkle. Choice induced preference change
can happen even when we are not making an informed choice,
but just choosing randomly between two options that are temporarily hidden,
which which is very interesting. So there's some part of
us that, again, if the if the cognitive dissonance interpretation
of this phenomenon is correct, there's some part of us

(44:37):
that feels a kind of agency that needs to be
accounted for in what you chose, even if you didn't
know what you were choosing, Even if you're just choosing
you know, hats and you can't see what's inside them,
or or yeah, door number three, you still feel like
I picked that and I need to justify that decision internally. Huh, yeah,
that that is That is interesting. I'm surprised we we

(44:59):
don't see more of this utilized in online advertising. You know,
like maybe there's a version of that YouTube scenarios describing
earlier where instead of giving you a choice of specific as,
it says, what do you want AD number one or
add number two? And maybe it's a completely false choice.
You know you're always going to get the same ad,
but they are going to give you the provide this
illusion that you had to say. Well, this is interesting

(45:21):
because when people do not have the illusion that they
have a say, then apparently the effect does not hold
because again, thing back to the computer condition. At least
in this study, choice induced preference change only seems to
apply if you think it's really you making the choice,
not if some someone or something else chooses for you.

(45:42):
And this mirror is what brim found in the gift condition.
If you're given three options and then the computer says, Okay,
of these three options, you get number three. It doesn't
have you don't change your evaluations afterwards. Now to come
back to the Black Mirror Bandersnatch episode, which again is
a a choose your own adventure type episode where you

(46:02):
make choices when you watch it in Netflix. Um, I
remember when I rewatched it last year for our episode.
I ended up being really pleased with the way it
came together based on my choices. But it was because
what was it? Because I actually hit on a good
combo of narrative branches and this choose your own adventure
world or or was it this? You know, because to

(46:22):
a certain extent there are aspects of of of of
all this, and in the blind test, you know, you
don't necessarily know how the choices you make will impact
the overall shape of the narrative by the time you're
done with it. That's a really good comparison. I mean,
I feel well, I mean thinking about how I interacted
with Bandersnatch or with Choose your Own Adventure books when

(46:44):
I was a kid. It's funny how we feel some
amount of angst and personal accountability, or at least I
did for how the band or snatch or to choose
your own adventure choices turn out, even though there's usually
no way you could have predicted the ways that they
will actually play out in narrative. Merely the suggestion that

(47:04):
you're in control seems to be enough to conjure the
shadow of personal agency over the direction of the narrative,
and thus I think enough to bring in the feeling
of cognitive dissonance when you choose a path that goes
somewhere you don't like or that feels bad or increases
the tension. Yeah. So there's another study and an older
study that I wanted to mention briefly, and this one

(47:27):
is from the year two thousand ten that looks at
choice induced preference change in children and non human animals.
And I thought that this was very interesting because this
seems to get to because you could wonder, like, Okay,
so it seems like this choice induced preference change thing,
it really does go on. But is this a function
of like like adult cognition, you know, adult pictures of

(47:49):
the self, or would this happen at a more primal
level that you would see even in you know, uh,
even in four year old children and in monkeys and
stuff and it, and it looks like the answer is
basically yes, you do see this even in four year
old children and capuchin monkeys. Now you might wonder how
you could how you could create the test conditions there,

(48:09):
because you can't like ask them to to like rate
a list of appliances or something. Right, um So, the
study design here for for human children. It's kind of
complicated to explain, but once I read it, I thought
it was actually very elegant and ingenious. So if you
don't mind, I just want to read their description of
their experimental set up here. Oh and sorry, I don't
think I said that. This. This paper is by Luisa

(48:31):
see Egan, Paul Bloom, and Laurie are Santos in the
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in two thousand ten. Um So,
to read from their their methodology with the test condition
involving human children, quote, the experiment are first displayed an
opaque gray stocking to the child and sequentially extracted three

(48:52):
toys described as some of the experimenter's favorite things, which
were really fun, but you have to be creative with them.
The toys distended the stockings such that the contours of
each could be seen, but the color could not be discerned.
The experiment are extracted and displayed the three toys to
the child, described them as some of her favorite things,

(49:14):
then shuffled them as she lifted them behind an occluder,
and announced that she would hide the toys. She removed
the occluder to display two stockings, one dotted and one argyle.
The experimenter pointed out that the outlines of two toys
were visible within one of the stockings, and that the
outline of the third toy was visible in the second stocking.

(49:36):
In the choice condition, the experiment are held up the
stocking with two toys and asked the child to reach
in without peeking and choose a toy. In the no
choice condition, the experimenter reached into the stocking with two toys,
pulled one closer to the mouth of the stocking, held
up the stocking, and asked the child to remove the
toy on top, again without peaking. In phase two, a

(50:00):
second experiment or blind to which stocking originally contained two toys,
indicated the two stockings and asked the child to choose
a toy to play with. Children were instructed not to
peak before making their selection. So what were the results here? Well,
in the choice condition, children strongly preferred the toy in

(50:20):
the second stocking, meaning the toy that they had not
had a chance to reject from the first stocking. Uh
And and they preferred sixty six point seven percent of
children in the choice condition went for the new toy
in the second stocking instead of the one that they
hadn't grabbed from from the first stocking. But in the

(50:40):
no choice condition, remember this is the one where the
experiment or picks for the kid. The kid doesn't get
to pick themselves, the effect vanished. In fact, in the
condition where the toy was chosen for them, kids did
the opposite, with the majority wanting to reach into the
first stocking again and get the other toy. And remember

(51:00):
that this is despite them fishing the toys out at random. Uh.
And there was also a similar test on capuchin monkeys.
I'm not going to go into as much detail, and
that one it involves skittles instead of toys, and it
found the same thing. When monkeys were tricked into believing
that they had a choice between two initial candies and
then they were given the option to choose between the

(51:22):
previously rejected candy of the first two and a new
third alternative. They overwhelmingly preferred the new alternative instead of
the one that they had not chosen in the previous choice.
So again, it looks kind of like once discarded, now despised.
But as with human children, this was only true if
the monkeys were made to think they had a free

(51:43):
choice between the first two. If the choice was clearly
made for them and they didn't get to pick, they
no longer seemed to devalue the other option from the
first pair of candies. Uh. That that's very interesting to me.
And it's interesting that if this man of us in
children and monkeys, it seems like choice induced preference change

(52:04):
obviously doesn't depend on any sort of like adult sense
of self image or sophisticated logic logical reasoning. Based on
this study, if this holds up, it appears that our
choices may influence our preferences at a fairly primal level.
And I want to read from a section that from
their conclusion that picks up on one of the things

(52:24):
I noted about the children's no choice condition. So quote, curiously,
we observed a marginally significant effect in which children in
the no choice condition. Remember that this one where they
didn't get to pick the experiment or picked for them
out of the first stocking, they preferred the toy that
the experiment or did not give them. Although we had

(52:45):
originally hypothesized that children would be at chance on this condition,
the observed pattern of performance hence that children's preferences may
change not merely because of their choices, but also because
of their lack of choices. Consistent with Brims nineteen sixty
six reactance theory and Brim and Wine Troubes research on
reactants and two year olds, children's preferences may reflect psychological

(53:08):
reactants when choice freedom is denied. So and the possibility
uh here is that the effect is not only not
present when you perceive somebody else's denying you a free choice,
there could be a reverse effect. Once one of two
options is denied you by an outside force. The denied
option is not only not despised, it's coveted. You want

(53:32):
that thing that you were told you couldn't have. Yeah,
I imagine we can a lot of us can imagine.
Remember childhood examples of this, you know, like the the
toy you were not permitted to have, the the book
that was denied to you, that sort of thing. Yeah. Now, now,
of course there are always gonna be reasons for this
that make it makes sense in your brain, like they're

(53:53):
intrinsic qualities to that toy or that book or something
that seemed like that's why I really wanted. But it
seems like even among toys that are identical, there there
is this preference that arises from Uh. It seems like
if we have had the option to pick something and
we didn't pick it, afterwards, it's it becomes far less
interesting to us. We don't really want it at all.

(54:15):
But if we were presented with something as a possible
option and we're not given the opportunity to get it,
then we really wanted. So anyway, I was looking around
for some challenges to the to the choice induce preference
change phenomenon, and I was trying to find if there
are any studies that found the opposite. There are a few.
For example, I found this paper which criticizes the interpretation

(54:38):
of Brim's original findings and the replications UM and it
attempts a modified replication of its own. So this was
by Steiner Holden Pol in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
Do choices affect preferences? Some doubts and new evidence, and
the author here says quote, I find no evidence of
choice induced changes in prefer says after a choice between

(55:01):
items where one was viewed as more attractive than the other,
but potentially some weak evidence of changes in preferences after
a choice between items viewed as equally attractive. So that's
worth keeping in mind. There are some challenges to this phenomenon,
and in its robustness that this does appear to be
a minority finding, and in fact it doesn't fully contradict

(55:22):
to the other results, it only partially contradicts them. But
then finally I wanted to get to one last study
I was reading. This was actually the one I was
reading about that made me want to do this episode
in the first place. It's a very recent study on
choice induced preference change, this time in human babies in
in pre verbal human infants, published just this year. So
this is by Alex M. Silver, Amy, E. Stall Rita Loyaltial,

(55:47):
Alexis S. Smith Flores, and Lisa Feigenson. When not choosing
leads to not liking choice, induced preference in infancy published
in Psychological Science this year. Some of the authors were
Affilly did with Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pittsburgh,
and the College of New Jersey, and again they tested
for choice induced preference change in pre verbal infants across

(56:10):
seven studies with the methodology that's uh somewhat similar to
one of the ones we looked at earlier, with the
ones testing with four year olds and capuchin monkeys and UH.
From from their conclusion and discussion, they say, quote our
findings suggests that choice induced preference change does not require
extensive experience making choices, nor does it rely on advanced

(56:32):
metacognitive ability or developed sense of self, because they found
this in pre verbal infants. If pre verbal infants are
changing their their preferences based on what they've chosen, it
seems like it really would not require any of those things.
It's happening at some lower level in the brain. And
it also raises interesting questions about how preferences get formed

(56:56):
very early in life, if they might stem from choices
made at random in some sense when you're a baby. Uh,
Like they say, quote, our findings add to our understanding
of the role of choice in infancy, showing that infants
use their own choices to shape their preferences. This work
raises the question of whether other aspects of the psychology

(57:17):
of decision making also have their roots in very early life. So, yeah,
that doesn't make me wonder if, like, there are things
that adults are still carrying trying to keep a consistent
narrative about their preferences, their likes and dislikes that may
have their roots may have emerged at some point when
they made some basically random decision as a pre verbal infant.

(57:38):
Isn't that weird? That is weird. Yeah, yeah, it's like
you don't want to dwell on the past and to
think that you know choices in your past to find you.
But what if those are baby choices? What if it
all rides down to baby choices? Right? What if things
that you think of as fundamental to your you know,
your own idiosyncrasies, your your view of yourself, are rooted
in you just trying to stay consistent with something that

(58:02):
happened when you were two or one, even I mean,
you know, I picked I picked the yellow block instead
of the red block, and and ever since then, yellow
has been my preferred color interesting. Um, I had a
I had a scenario in my head. I'm not I
don't think this one necessarily applies, but perhaps you have.

(58:27):
You have an opinion on it based on what we've
discussed so far. In the movie A Christmas Story, Okay,
the old man receives a major award, which of course
turns out to be a lamp that looks like a
woman's leg. Um, how would you um interpret his attachment
to the major award? Well, clearly he he is suffering

(58:49):
from a kind of preference bias about the major award.
That's like a self flattering bias of some kind. I'm
not sure best how to categorize it. I don't think
it would be choice induced prefer its changed because he
didn't pick the leg lamp. It was picked for him,
and the studies have showed that when things are picked
for you, this effect does not manifest. But I think

(59:10):
he's doing a different kind of thing, which is Um,
the leg lamp is a symbol of his intellectual prowess
and victory, and thus the leg lamp is itself beautiful
and good. Yes, all right? And then of course there's
the added wrinkle that his wife does not like the
award and does not think it should be in the
front of the house, which he regards as a personal

(59:31):
insult because he has so deeply associated this lamp with
his with his personal intellectual abilities mind power. Uh. This
all also made me think of another great work, um,
that would be a Paradise Lost by by Milton. We
have that line from Satan the mind is its own
place and in itself can make a heaven of hell

(59:55):
a hell of heaven. That's yeah, that's that's really good
because I've never or interpreted this line in that way
as like a reflection of an ex post facto justification
to reduce cognitive dissonance. But you could absolutely read it
that way. You can totally see it like that. I mean,
I've always interpreted it I guess as um, you know,

(01:00:16):
just a statement about like, you know, the power to,
like Satan is asserting that he can make what he
will of any situation. But yeah, you could interpret that
much more in a cognitive bias way where he's saying like, well,
you know, I made my decisions, and my decisions led
me to hell, and thus I will engage in choice
supportive biased reasoning that makes me think actually, actually Hell

(01:00:39):
is good. It's good, you know, you know, uh, and
that reduces the cognitive dissonance within Satan's soul. What if
you just had a vision of hell where everybody's in
that where people are they're just all setting around, you know,
being tortured or torturing each other, like this place is great,
this is great. I don't Yeah, I wouldn't to be

(01:00:59):
in heaven. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a fantastic image
in with Yeah, we ended by justifying the ways of
God demands, so it's generally what we seek to do
in this uh this podcast. Wait, no, aren't we justifying
the ways of Satan demand? I think that's what we did.
Oh yeah, I guess that's all what we're doing here. Yeah,
even better. Yeah, A lesser go, a lower go. All right,

(01:01:23):
well we'll go and close this one out. I think
this will be a fun one for listeners to reflect on,
especially since I think we actually had a stocking based
experiment there. Maybe you can reflect on on on on
gift giving and stockings and and so forth with the
holiday season that we're passing through at the moment. Uh,
certainly everybody can relate on some level to some of

(01:01:43):
the mental mechanics that we're discussing here in this episode.
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