New Year's Resolutions: Science and Moral Behavior

So many of our most common resolutions for personal improvement are inherently narcissistic: Quit smoking, lose weight, get in shape. We want to look sexier, feel stronger and live forever. But beyond this alternately self-gratifying and self-flagellating topography lies the most quintessential self-improvement project of all: Being a better person. Can science show us how to re-engineer our moral behavior and live better lives? Robert and Joe explore.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to blow your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey, welcome the stuff to go in your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and bad John mc comick. So, Robert,
I want to ask you a question. Are you the
kind of person who makes New Year's resolutions? Oh? I

(00:25):
try to be very careful about it these days, and
I also exclusively begin my New year on Chinese New
Year these days. Oh, what day is that it's gonna be? Uh?
I want to stay February eight this year. I could
be wrong, but it's yeah. It generally occurs like one
month out from from Western New Year because I feel

(00:47):
mainly I feel that like if you're if you're gonna
get excited about like turning over a new leaf, for
getting back in the role of things. However you choose
to take on a new year, like I try not
to to, you know, strap my self to the mask
too much, uh and make any kind of you know,
a weird bargain about the future. But it's like just

(01:08):
coming off the holidays, it's just too much chaos. Everything's
out of order. It's the worst time in the world
to decide you're going to start a new habit or
a new cycle of doing things, or are you gonna
or that you're gonna engage in any level of betterment,
Better to wait until January is over and try that
stuff out in February. That's that's my approach. Yeah, I

(01:30):
think if you're going to make a resolution, you should
do it in the spring. Yeah, But have you ever
made a New Year's resolution and like actually followed through
with it, Like if you've tried it? Was it always
just kind of a thing you thought about for a
bit and then u um, maybe in the you know,
earlier on. But like I think last year, I decided

(01:51):
to stick to a basic yoga schedule, like decide what
classes I was going to go to and make a
point to go to them, and and worked out well.
But that was a reasonable goal, like something that that
I was already sort of halfway meeting, and then I
just said, all right, we're gonna just roll with this
this routine once things get going in February. I don't

(02:12):
know if you've ever noticed this to be the case
at a GEM or y m c A or something
that you go to, but they're just horrible in like January,
first half of February you just it's it's they're packed
and then there and then the herd thins out. You know,
suddenly nobody's coming anymore by March. Yeah, yeah, I definitely
noticed that because I go to yoga at a y
m c A and and I love it. I love

(02:34):
my yoga teachers, all of the classes. But you do
see that influx of new faces, and a lot of
them are not gonna, not gonna stick around. And some
of them will show up with their genes on in
socks and with no understanding of what they're about to
get into. Some will show up fifteen or twenty minutes
late or leave fifteen or twenty minutes early. But it's yeah,
it's just part of the process of people setting goals,

(02:55):
trying new things, and not everything works out, and that's
not necessarily a bad thing, but of course that that's
always the kind of goal you see, right when people
make New Year's resolutions, they it seems like they're almost
always inherently narcissistic, like they are for personal improvement. But
there for that kind of personal improvement, like I'm going
to quit smoking, I'm gonna lose weight, I'm gonna get

(03:18):
in shape. There for things that that aren't bad. I mean,
they're good for you, but they're they're you know, sort
of self focused. Yeah, I mean those seem to be
the ones that dominate all the lists and advice columns
that come out around this time of year. We want
to you know, we want to look sexier and feel
stronger and live forever. This is gonna be the year

(03:39):
I live forever, exactly right, and really locking down eternity
this year. Um. But instead of these kind of self gratifying, uh,
you know, self improvement projects, I wondered about the personal
betterment project of of trying to be a better person.
I know sometimes people think about this in New Year's
and and and why shouldn't we think about it? Like,

(04:02):
if we're going to try to commit to changing our
lives in some way for the better, why not try
to be better humans? Yeah? And you know, and I
know some individuals do engage in, uh in this kind
of goal setting. But but it's it's also just as
if not more difficult. It's more it's just as challenging

(04:23):
as trying to change your body. You're going to try
and change your your mind state. Instead, you're gonna change
the way you interact with those around you and what
you care about, and and try and do so in
a in a meaningful way that actually lasts beyond January. Yeah,
I mean, how realistic is it to say this is
the year I stopped kicking strangers down flights of stairs,

(04:45):
because if that's already your thing, I mean, people really
don't change all that much. People change, but it it
takes a little bit more to to really turn over
a new leaf. Well, that's an interesting thing. You point out.
People don't change engine by and large. That's the extent
to which that's true is depressing. It's very, very difficult

(05:07):
to truly change our behavior in an effective, significant and
permanent way. But fortunately we do have some science about
the mind. And this is what we're gonna end up
talking about today. If you make a New Year's resolution
that you actually want to be a better person, you
want to live a more moral life and treat others better,

(05:28):
and not just in this vague form of you know,
I'm gonna do it some kind kind of promise, but
in a way that actually gets results and changes your behavior.
How can we do it? It seems like we should
look to science. Yeah, because we were talking about leveling
up the old d n D character sheet. Here we're
talking about changing our stats. Uh, what does science have

(05:52):
to say about stat adjustments on the real life character sheet? Right?
And I can already hear people objecting and saying, wait
a minute, you can't do that, because science is about
empirical facts and morality is about values, and those things
don't mix. Now, one of the things I'd say is
that there, in fact, is an ongoing debate about whether

(06:14):
you can derive moral values from science. I'm not saying
you can, but we don't need to go there for
the purpose of this discussion. Like that, that's a debate
we don't even have to enter, because I would put
up an analogy of engineering, like let's say you're building
a hydroelectric dam. There is nothing about physics, chemistry, fluid dynamics,

(06:36):
any of that that tells you that it's best to
build a dam that produces the most electricity, cost the
least money to build, has the lowest ecological impact on
the river that you put it in, and has the
least likelihood of failing and flooding everybody downstream. But if
you start with those priorities as your assumptions, you can
most definitely use scientific fields like physics and chemistry and

(06:59):
fluid dynam amics to build the best possible dam to
achieve those goals. And I think you can sort of
approach morality in the same way. If you start with
some given goals of improving moral behavior, and especially you
want to start with specific ones like uh, like maybe
making yourself more generous or being more honest, you can

(07:21):
use research in neuroscience and psychology and related fields to
optimize your moral behavior and use what we know about
the human mind and the brain to fix the problem
and get results, sort of trick your brain and making
you the person you want to be. Yeah, So before
we get into the actual research, I do definitely want

(07:42):
to start with some caveats because the scientific study of
moral behavior is far from perfect and there are a
lot of potential difficulties we encounter when entering this field.
One example would be a sort of lack of agreement
on moral goal, like if a study is being conducted

(08:03):
by a member of a religion that says tomatoes or
minor gods and eating them as a heinous sin. Abstention
from tomato products is a crucial part of moral behavior,
and this is why it's important to study clearly specified
types of behavior one at a time, like studying how
much money someone gives to a charity as opposed to
just studying how good of a person are you? Yeah,

(08:26):
and and also in this getting into things that are
more or less universally considered moral positives. Yeah. Um. Another
thing would be that I think morality is an area
where you have to be especially careful about experiment or bias.
For example, it's probably no surprise that, uh, if your
experiment ers are a group of liberals, they might find

(08:49):
that liberals are more moral than conservatives, and vice versa.
If their conservatives, they might find conservatives are more moral. Um,
So you have to be especially cognizant of your of
your you know, experimental controls put in place to limit
the fact that the extent to which bias can affect
the outcomes. And then you've got methodological difficulties like how

(09:10):
do you test to see how moral somebody's behavior is?
You know, you can invite them into a lab and
have them play a game or do some kind of
interaction under controlled conditions, but people might behave very differently
under controlled conditions than they do in the wild. It's
one thing to give somebody a questionnaire, or have to
read a story and tell you how they feel about it,

(09:32):
or put some pebbles in a cup, But ultimately we're
talking about the real morality takes place in outside the lab. Yeah,
but then if you want to track people's morality outside
the lab, you're pretty much gonna have to use self reporting, right,
people are going to have to report to you what
they did. And there is a pretty obvious problem there.
How honest can we expect people to be about what

(09:55):
their moral behaviors are. So, despite all those difficulties, I
think this is still a field we can study and
a place where we can try to look at some
studies and apply them to our moral behaviors to see
if we can hack our morals and and get under
the get under the bedrock there and move some things around.
So I think maybe the first place we should start

(10:16):
is by looking at some traditional answers to the question
of how to be a better person. Like, this is
not a new question, obviously, people have been talking about
this for thousands of years. You could look back to Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle, or you know, all the way up to
more recent moral philosophers go a couple hundred years ago
to Emmanuel Kant. These are people who had very strong

(10:38):
opinions about how you could derive from first principles what
the moral life was and how to live it. So
the question is does moral philosophy or studying ethics make
you a better person? And this is where a really
interesting article from Ian magazine comes into play, written by

(10:59):
Eric Gushway skivel Uh titled Well, the Ian magazine titles
kind of shift, but I think the cheeseburger ethics with
kind of a subhead how often do ethics professors call
their mothers right? And it attempts to answer this question
where Schwitz cable and he he chronicles his work and
his work with another person named Joshua Rust over the

(11:21):
years to study how exactly do people who study ethics
and moral philosophy behave in their lives? Does does studying
ethics make you a better person? And they seem to
have found time and time again that the answer is no.
Ethicists who are you know, professors who study ethics and
moral philosophy for a living don't seem to be any

(11:44):
better or worse than other professors. So professors of chemistry, history,
et cetera, by a huge list of measures. Uh, they give,
they give a list. In this article, Schwitz Cable says
he looked at whether or not you vote in public collections,
how often you call your mother, eating the meat of mammals,

(12:06):
donating to charity, littering, disruptive chatting, and door slamming during
philosophy presentation, responding to student emails, attending conferences without paying
registration fees. There's a real killer there. Um organ donation,
blood donation, theft of library books, and overall moral evaluation

(12:29):
by one's departmental peers based on personal impressions. So there
you get at least some third party info. Their honesty
and responding to survey questions and joining the Nazi Party
in nineteen thirties Germany. And what they found is that
the ethicists uh and the moral philosophers just they're like

(12:49):
everybody else. They're like the other professors studying. This doesn't
make them do any better on these tests. Now, one
thing that they did find it was different, is that
ethicists tend to accept more rigorous moral standards than non ethicists,
Yet they don't seem to be any more likely to
actually follow them. So a couple of examples they give.

(13:12):
One is that ethicists are way more likely than other
people to say that eating the meat of mammals is
morally wrong, yet they don't eat the meat of mammals
any less than anybody else. They're also more likely to
say that you should give more of your income a
higher percentage to charity than other people say, but they

(13:33):
don't give more than other people do. So it's like
they tend to accept higher standards, but they can't meet them.
So they have a more precise understanding of the sort
of the ethical suit of armor we all should be wearing,
but they're they're no more likely than we are to
slip it on exactly. Yeah, that's a good way of

(13:53):
putting it. And there are a lot of explanations. This
is actually Schwitz Gables article is a really good one,
and I h recommend reading it. It's very interesting. But
and he gives lots of explanations for why this might
be the case. But yeah, it appears that studying ethics
and moral philosophy is not the answer to not necessarily bad.
It's not that you shouldn't do it, but it's not

(14:14):
going to make you behave more and morally at least statistically.
Now there's another very traditional, classic answer to this question,
how to be a better person, you get some religion
in you. And the Udian magazine article went into that
a little bit and mentioning members of the clergy and
in questioning us and members of the clergy that asking them, hey,

(14:35):
is they member of the clergy? Are they a better
person than the the average person outside um, the church?
And they said, um, you know it's probably about the same,
maybe the clergy a little worse. Uh yeah, And and
of course he could chalk that he chalked that up
to It's possible they were just being humble about their
own profession, but at least as as far as they

(14:56):
presented publicly, they didn't think that they were any better
than anybody else. And there have been plenty of studies
that have looked into the relationship between levels of religiosity
and moral behavior. Now, when we get into this, it's
of course worth thing that this is a super loaded topic.
People often have very strong feelings about whether or not

(15:19):
religion is a good thing or a bad thing, So
it's again very easy to see how bias could creep
into scientific research on this subject if we're not careful.
But like we said, there have been lots of studies. Uh,
the answers seem to be I would say, very complicated
and contradictory. You see stuff going on both sides in
both directions on this. Uh. For example, I I know

(15:42):
you found one study that a religious belief in Hell
is linked to lower crime. Right, Yeah, that was awous.
Twelve paper diversion Effects of Belief in Heaven and Hell
and National Crime Rates by A. Zem F Sharif um Well,
he co authored it at any rate psychologist, and he
compared national crime rates with rates of belief in Heaven

(16:03):
and Hell in sixty seven countries, and it came back
with some interesting findings. First of all, Heaven's belief rate
is almost always higher than Hell's belief rate um. And
that kind of collaborates my personal theory that Hell is
always an unwanted and add on for many religions or
for even just semi religious people. It's the side dish

(16:24):
we didn't order, and generally we don't want to eat it.
But the papers major statistical finding was that nations with
higher belief rates in Hell predicted the lower crime rates,
while higher belief rates and heaven predicted higher crime rates.
Wait what Yeah, so essentially that the idea here, I
guess that you could say that the the stick was
more effective than the carrot um as far as the

(16:46):
religious worldview goes. Uh, And that health fearing citizens are
more mindful of screwing up in this life, while the
heaven crowd think they've got it knocked in the next life.
No matter what. It's um. But but even this study
underlying some of the problems here, because when you just
talk about religion, what are you talking about religion? Has
the one religion or even one slice of a particular

(17:09):
faith might tweak the carrot stick scenario a little bit
in one direction or the other. How is this system
of faith enforcing more behavior? Is it? You know, is
it really cutting you off from the world around you?
And and uh? And focusing inward? Is it focusing outward?
And it's going to vary from faith to faith. Yeah,

(17:30):
and it's going to vary from person to person. I mean,
part of the problem here is that when we're dealing
with science, we're always dealing with broad statistical phenomena. So
it might be the case that in general, religion makes
people better, but it actually makes you worse, or vice versa.
In general, it makes people worse, but it makes you better.
You could be the anomaly, you could be different than
the average. Yeah. And I also want to mention that

(17:52):
there's a two thousand three Harvard study that determined economic
growth responds positible but positively to the extent of religious
but leaves notably those in heaven and hell. So their
take was that high religious beliefs stimulate growth, stimulate economic
growth because they help sustain behavior. But again that's a
an economic view. But then again, there there's no We

(18:15):
read some research this year about the effects of religious
belief or at least correlations between religious religiosity and children
and altruism, right, Yeah, this was Yeah, a new study
that came out titled the Negative Association between religiousness and
Children's Altruism across the World, and this was published in

(18:35):
the journal Current Biology. Was a study of one thousand,
one hundred seventy children in Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, South Africa,
and the United States and included five Muslims, two Christians,
and three d twenty three non religious children. And what
do they find. Their key findings were that, first of all,
family religious identification decreases children's altruistic behaviors decreases decreases it uh,

(19:00):
And that religiousness predicts parent reported child sensitivity to injustices
and empathy, and that children from religious households are harsher
in their punitive tendencies. Okay, so so this found at
least in this one study, this broad survey of of
religious and non religious children, and the children were from
a couple of different religions, the religious kids did not

(19:22):
do better in terms of being kinder to others being
more altruistic. In fact, they did worse. Yeah, I imagine.
I mean, you can sort of view it as the
religion just provides a framework in which we make sense
of our own moral achievements and failings, rather than a
guideline that holds us up. Yeah. But then again, there
have been other studies that, of course found religious spurring,

(19:44):
a sort of religious priming, caused people to behave better right. Yeah,
there was a two thousand studies two thousand seven paper
in Psychological Science that found both religious and non religious
people shared more money with a stranger after reading sentences
containing various whigious words such as spirit and God. But
people were also more generous after reading words associated with

(20:05):
secular authorities such as police. Uh. And then there's another
study that was published in seventy three in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, and they found that more
religious people were just as likely as rest less religious
people to bypass a stranger in distress. Yeah, and and
that parody does seem to come through in the literature
a good bit. I want to look at one more

(20:25):
statistical study on religious behavior, and it wasn't just on
religious behavior, but it included that. And that was a
two thousand and fourteen study in in Science called Morality
in Everyday Life by Wilhelm Hoffman, Daniel C. Waizenski, Mark J. Brandt,
and Linda J. Skitka. And this is where they got

(20:46):
a group of twelve hundred and fifty two participants and
they were each participant received five text messages a day
for three days. Each text message had a link to
the studies website, which prompted them to record moral and
in world experiences they'd gone through in the previous hour. So,
did anything interestingly moral immoral just happened in your life?

(21:08):
Did somebody do something moral or immoral to you, did
you do something moral or immoral? Just some examples from
a These were some great examples I read on a
news release about this. The of the good deeds reported
included sharing an extra sandwich with a homeless man. That's
guys good. But examples of the types of bad deeds

(21:29):
reported were arranging an adulterous encounter and quote hired someone
to kill a musk rat that's not ultimately causing any harm. Well,
I feel I can feel good then that I have
not done either of those things this week, right, So
maybe you should license yourself to do something evil because

(21:49):
you haven't had a muskrat assassinated. I like that they
were just arranging an adulterous encounter that because that brings
to mind and maybe they were not engaged in it,
but they just orchestrated the the rendezvous. Oh well, I
mean that was the A lot of after the Ashley
Madison leak, A lot of people had this defense, right,
like I was sort of seeking an affair, but I

(22:10):
never actually had one. Um. But anyway, so what did
they find in this study? They found over the broad
statistics of the study, religious and non religious people committed
both moral and immoral acts with about the same frequency.
There just really wasn't a big difference in how they acted.
So these are what we've just talked about moral philosophy

(22:31):
and ethics and in religion. These are not arguments against
adhering to a religion or studying moral philosophy. It's not
like saying you know that those are bad things to do.
It's just certainly not clear that either of these will
put you on the path to moral excellence. Yeah. I
keep coming back to the suit of armor um analogy
I made earlier. It's I guess the way to look
at it is taking on a religious faith or even

(22:55):
just kind of pseudo religious faith, or a new age
a way of looking at it, any kind of worldview.
It's not an exoskeleton that's going to power your body.
It's it's more in line with a suit of armor, clothing,
a mapping system, some sort of framework for how moral
behavior can work. But you're still going to have to
move in that thing yourself. You have to use. Your
muscles are going to be the thing making you walk

(23:17):
across the room. Yeah, I think that's a really good analogy.
It's just like the ethics thing In both cases, the
religion and the study of ethics might give you clearer
ideas about what you think your moral goals should be.
But in order to get the motivation to follow through
on your moral convention convictions you're you just might need
some better tricks, better tricks up your sleeve, and we

(23:37):
might find find these tricks in studying psychology. So what
do we know about the human brain and moral behavior?
And are there anyways we can use science to trick
the former into the ladder? Okay, okay, So we're now
going to be looking at some scientific studies about factors

(23:58):
that correlate to or per it's even cause differences in
how we practice moral behavior towards others. And I think
one of the biggest areas that's been studied in this
field is generosity, that the act of giving and giving
more to others, taking you know, self sacrificially offering to
other people things that can help them. And there have

(24:20):
been lots and lots of studies in this field, right, Yes,
there have, and certainly we're not gonna be able to
explore all of them today. Yeah, but we're going to
try to offer a selection of some that we found interesting.
And that might be useful in coming up with strategies
of improving your moral behavior. And one of the findings
has to do with how we respond to the idea

(24:41):
of the victim in in the case where somebody needs
generosity or somebody could benefit from your health. Yeah. This
is from a paper Sympathy and Callousness The Impact of
deliberative Thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims, And
this is published in the General Organizational behavi if you're
in human Performance. So the study basically looked at the

(25:03):
whole face of the tragedy angle. Yeah, and you can
probably be familiar with this just from your experience. Right,
there's sort of you know that old quote, uh that
one death is a tragedy, a million deaths or a
statistic Yeah, it sort of goes along those lines, right. Yeah.
This boils down to the you know, the common fact
that if a tragedy occurs somewhere in the world, what

(25:25):
are you going to respond to. You're gonna respond to
a statistical breakdown about how many people are suffering and
what happened, or are you going to respond to that
one evocative photo of a single individual who's suffering? Yeah,
And it, you know it. It shouldn't be the case,
but it is the case that the former is true.
I mean, if you care about helping one person, you

(25:47):
should care a hundred times as much about helping a
hundred people, right, But that is not, in fact the case,
That is not what our brains do. Yeah, this study
found that when thinking deliberatively, people discount sympathy towards identifiable
victims but failed to generate sympathy towards statistical victims. So

(26:08):
some of the key takeaways from from this study where
that teaching or priming people to recognize the discrepancy in
giving toward identifiable and statistical victims has a perverse effect.
Individuals give less to identifiable victims, but they don't actually
increase giving to statistical victims. So no, so this is
not just what we mentioned, but the fact that thinking

(26:28):
about it deliberately doesn't help. In fact, it makes you
less generous. Yeah, I guess it's kind of like you
see through what were the old TV ads where for
just pennies a day you can help this child. Um, yeah,
I can't remember name the actors from what all in
the family we do those commercials? No, it's true, you know,
if there there's like a you know, Save the Children

(26:49):
or something like that, they would say, this child is Jeffrey,
you know, Jeffrey, Jeffrey needs help, when really the problem
is that there are many, many children who are suffering. Yeah,
but the weird thing is that the study seems to
indicate that we're more likely to want to help Jeffrey.
But then if we are convinced that Jeffrey either isn't
real or we're just like, that's just one kid and

(27:11):
it's a seede problem going on, realizing that we don't
actually want to we don't even want to help Jeffrey anymore. Yeah,
we don't want to hel Jeffrey, were we don't end
up helping everyone else either, So it just kind of
stalls out. Um. They they found that if organizations want
to raise money for a charitable cause, it's far better
to appeal to the heart with that photo of Jeffrey

(27:31):
than to the head with you know, a full sort
of MPR breakdown about who's suffering and what the needs
are feeling, rather than analytical thinking drive donation. Yeah. So
that's kind of unfortunate because on one hand, you always
want to provide people with the most true, accurate information possible. Right,
But it turns out that in general, people respond more

(27:55):
to perhaps a skewed, uh not fully curate picture of
the problem. You're more likely to help if you haven't
thought about the problem all that much, and you're responding
emotionally to one particular anecdote about a particular person suffering
rather than a true, you know, numerical representation of the

(28:17):
scope of the problem and asked to think about it deliberately. Right. Yeah.
So anyway, the takeaway from this though, might be that
if you want to be more generous, focus on the
focus on the anecdote, right, yeah, focus on and individuals,
and and also like, don't give into the uh, don't

(28:37):
don't give into the into the skepticism of or just
the negativity of saying, hey, you're trying to manipulate me
with this picture of this uh, this child or this
suffering individual, Like, I guess take it at face value. Um,
you know, unless there's something shady going on, take it
it face value that, Yeah, this is what's going on,
and I need to emotionally connect with this. Okay, Well,
what's another finding about weird ways we might encourage trick

(29:00):
our brains into being more generous. Well, one way is
to endure ritual pain. Uh, ritual pain. Huh yeah, yeah,
this is uh so uh. This is one that I
actually was turned onto by another Ian magazine article, and
this one came from anthropologists Dmitri Zagats and he was
studying um uh in particularly, he was looking at Thia

(29:23):
pussum Uh festival, which is a Hindu festival uh thaih
Posum is a Hindu festival celebrate on the full moon
in the Tamil month of Thai, and devotees prey and
make vows, and when their prayers are answered, they fulfilled
their vows by piercing parts of their bodies such as
their cheeks, their tongues and backs before you know, carrying

(29:43):
on the sacred vessel along a for a kilometer parade route.
Oh boy, yeah, so it does sound painful. Yeah, he was. So.
He was looking at this while and studying it while
also contemplating the work of French sociologists. He kneeled dur Time,
who argued in elementary forms of religious life, that's the
nineteen twelve work that the collective performance of ritual generates

(30:08):
a kind of electricity and a static state of shared
excitement that he referred to as collective effervescence. So, taking
that in mind, he looked to see what what kind
of effects does this painful ritual have on behavior and
in particularly generosity, he found quote, those who had participated

(30:29):
in the extreme ritual gave twice as much as those
who had taken part in collective collective prayer. He found
the same high levels of generosity among those who had
him him themselves gone through the painful activities, uh as
as those who had just merely followed the procession and
without actually engaging in self torture. So, as it turned out,

(30:51):
the painful ritual boosted pro social behavior for its participants.
Huh So, so you can look at this in a
number of ways, right, I mean you could think that, well,
maybe just the sort of ecstatic state of mind that
this ritual puts you in primes you to to give more.
Or you could look at this as a function of

(31:14):
just sort of a secondary function of being deeply involved
in a in a social and religious community, right yeah, yeah,
I mean, on one hand, yeah, you can also say
that you know you're feeling this pain and therefore in pain,
you're maybe more empathetic to the suffering of others, but
indeed you're also putting yourself in this collective effervescence. You're
allowing yourself to perhaps um catch generosity, to to to

(31:40):
to catch it as if it were some sort of
a disease or an illness. And that leads us to
another thing that scientists have found about generosity, which is
that to a certain extent, it's contagious. Yeah. We and
it's actually in specific ways that it's contagious. There are
other ways in which its apparently not contagious us. But yeah,

(32:00):
what if people found about the social contagion of generosity, Well,
there was there's a paper the Social Contagion of Generosity
my Molina Teviskova and Michael W. Macy, and they basically
looked at two ways that you can encounter generosity. Either
you're you've you've been a recipient, or you've watched someone

(32:21):
else receive it. And they found that receiving help can
increase the willingness to be generous towards others, but merely
observing help can have the opposite effect, especially among those
who have not received help yet. So it's kind of like,
you know, uh, what's what's the word like, you know,
passing the buck on, passing it, playing it forward or

(32:43):
something it pay forward. The book stops here because I
don't practice generosity to anyone. No, yeah, yeah, they there.
I think there's a horrible movie about that in there.
I believe that I have not seen it, so I
can't pass judgment on it. But yeah, but the idea
is that somebody who has had a kind thing done
for them is more likely to do a kind thing

(33:06):
for somebody else. And that was actually that was That
finding was replicated in the paper Morality in Everyday Life,
the same paper I talked about earlier. Yeah, that found
the text message. When that found no major difference between
religious and non religious people, it also found um support

(33:26):
for moral contagion. They found that people who benefited from
a moral deed were more likely to do something moral
for somebody else later on. So you could potentially talk
this up for being an argument for being a part of,
if not a religious community, and some sort of close
community that engages in generous activity right or even each other.
And then also to outsiders. I mean, if you really

(33:48):
wanted to trick your brain this way, you could set
up a relationship with somebody where you say, hey, you're
gonna be my generosity contagion buddy, and every day you're
gonna do three nice things for me that I didn't
expect that will maybe prime me to just be a
more generous person for the rest of the world. So, like,
pretend you're a vagrant, as if you're a character in

(34:09):
a Sherlock home story. Uh, and then when people are
generous to you, this will instill generosity in yourself. Yeah,
it could be. But at the same time, if you
want to trick your brain into being more generous, apparently
you shouldn't watch people being generous to others because that
you can just kind of diffuse the responsibility there. You know,
you watch somebody else doing some community work and you think,

(34:32):
oh that's nice. Well, I'm glad those people are getting
the help they need. I can go, you know, kick
somebody down the flight of stairs. Yeah, or maybe even thinking, hey,
nobody's helping me out, Well go on and do my thing.
One more funny thing I found about generosity I'm not
gonna spend a lot of time on. This was just
the finding that supposedly there are gender differences in what

(34:53):
encourages people to be more generous, and there's a study
that found that apparently men are more likely to donate
to the poor if reminded that doing so indirectly benefits
them as well as opposed to other encouraging justifications like oh,
the person really deserves the help, or they've had a
hard time. Men are most likely to donate if you

(35:14):
make the case to them that the donation is good
for the donor. Okay, so if you need to trick
yourself with that in mind, you can certainly use that
from an influtive purposes. Well, let's move on to another quality, honesty. Honesty, Uh, Robert,
don't want to put you in a scenario. Imagine I
give you a die, like a gambling die, and I

(35:37):
tell you that I'm going to pay you a sum
of money corresponding to the number of your role. So
the higher your role, the higher the payout. Six dots
gets you the most money, the cyclops I gets you
the least. And I ask you to roll your die
once so that I can't see it, and this is
the money roll. And then I allow you to roll
the die a few more times, just so you can

(35:58):
rest assured that the die is not loaded. It's a
regular die. You can roll whatever number, and then I
ask you via a computer terminal to enter the number
from your initial money role. I remember nobody saw the role,
but you you can enter any number you want. But
should you be honest how much money we're talking here? Show? Well,

(36:20):
let's let's say that I'm giving you about two fifty
or three bucks per per dot on the die, okay,
and then we're telling them all up. Yeah, Well, I mean,
in that case, I'm probably gonna be inclined to just
play by the rules because I'm gonna win some money,
I'm gonna lose some money, and uh, there's not really
any advantage in tweaking in my favorite. But if you're

(36:40):
not gonna lose any money, well, I mean, but I
am going to lose out on a maximum payout. But
the amount you could lose by not by not reporting
is not that much as you could get up to
what like eighteen bucks maybe here? Yeah okay, but if
it were for a single amount, if we were doing
one die roll for say three d bucks, and and
I didn't have it in my head that this is

(37:00):
like coming out of your pocket, that this wasn't gonna
hurt anybody that basically you had three d dollars to
spend on this experiment, then yeah, I would definitely lie
about it. So there's a price on your honesty. If
there is a price on my honesty, if it does
not hurt anyone, sure, yeah, I mean it would be
different if it was like I really wanted to, yeah,

(37:20):
take my wife out to dinner for our anniversary, but
I'm also going to do this crazy dice game instead. Well,
let's go back to about two fifty per per dot.
Imagine this under two different scenarios. Number one, you can
take as long as you want to enter the number
into the computer, You do your roles, and you can
just sit there and enter it whenever you want. The
other scenario is you have to enter it very quickly,

(37:43):
like within some number of seconds. Does this change what happens?
M So I'm gonna have less time to decide if
online or not. In that case, I probably tempted to
just enter the truth. Yeah. Funny you should say that,
because actually there's a study from Psychological Science in that

(38:04):
found exactly the opposite. They found. The paper was tall
called honesty requires time and lack of justifications. By h
Shall shall Vie or the Elder and Yoela Barebi Meyer.
And they found that people who could take as long
as they wanted ended up being more honest. But wait,
you might be asking, how did they know how honest

(38:25):
people were being if they couldn't see the die uh.
And here this is an interesting fact about the study.
They just used the power of statistics over many roles.
The average die roll will will begin to converge on
the natural average of three point five. You can do
the math yourself, you know, add up one through six
and then divide by six possible possibilities. The average should

(38:46):
be three point five. So if you try this with
many participants and you notice at the end that their
average is much higher than three point five, you can
be pretty much certain that they're lying. We can assume
almost nobody lied to reduce their payout. Uh. Thus the
answers consisted always of a mix of truthful reports and

(39:07):
then deceitful inflated reports. So they did one experiment where
they forced people to enter their result within twenty seconds,
and then of course they gave people as much time
as they wanted and for the for the people who
had to enter their role within twenty seconds, they found
an average of four point six people were really really

(39:27):
entering those sixes. And then they found that people who
did not have any time pressure integ roll of three
point nine. So both groups inflated their averages, but the
people who had more time to deliberate, who didn't have
a time constraint, were more honest they lied less. And
then they did a separate experiment where they did it again,

(39:49):
but they just gave people eight seconds, so even less
time to make the decision. The people who had eight
seconds had an average of four point four, so a
little bit less than the people who had twenty seconds,
But the people who had no time limit reported an
average of three point four, so pretty much right on
the average. So basically there's any Without time to reflect,

(40:10):
people are going to default to cheating. Yes, So to
take home here would be think long and hard about
your moral decisions, and that will perhaps lead you to
the more moral choice. Well, though that might not necessarily
be the case with something like generosity. This is a
funny thing where our our our decision to be moral,

(40:31):
and the way we hack our brain to follow through
with it is different depending on what moral quality we're
trying to encourage. According to this study, the longer and
more deliberately you think about something, probably the more honest
you're going to be, the less likely to cheat you're
going to be. But on the other one, you know,
we we saw we saw the deliberative thinking about generosity
made people less generous. Yeah. And in fact, there's a

(40:54):
two thousand fifteen study from the University of Missouri, Columbia,
and they their findings actually say, trust your gut, don't
think about it, just go with your gut instinct, and
that's liable to be the more moral choice. How did
that work out? Well? And I should know that the
moral choice here within the framework of the experiment relates

(41:15):
to to cheating. Uh. So they took a hundred individuals,
they gave him a questionnaire to determine their their base
dependency on gut instincts, and then they read them stories
in which they they make a mistake uh and blame
a co worker, and in the control group they take
full responsibility for the mistake. So their findings were, first
of all, the individuals who are prone to trust their

(41:36):
instinctive hunches may at times be less likely to commit
im moral acts compared to those who tend to discount
their intuition. So yeah, if you're the type of person
who says, is this the right choice? Is probably not
the right choice, then you're probably gonna end up flipping right. Uh.
They also found that people who tend to rely on
their gut instincts are less likely to cheat after reflecting

(41:56):
on past experiences during which they behaved in more like okay,
And then they did a second experiment and potestimants were
asked to write about a time they acted in morally
um or a control topic with control group, and then
they were asked to take an unsolvable i Q test.
People who tended to rely on their gut feelings, uh,
they found are less likely to cheat after reflecting on

(42:17):
a time when they behaved im morally. And the theory
here is that people try to compensate for past bad
behavior by acting morally in the present. So you might
be if you're a person who follows your gut instincts,
you might be more likely to tell the truth if
you think about a time you were dishonest in the past. Yeah,
it kind of depends on what your gut instinct tends
to be. What's your base gut instinct. If your your

(42:38):
gut instinct is always to lie about your your die roll,
then you know, stick with it and know what you know,
your gut know if your gut is uh is good
or even right? Well, I mean that that gut instinct.
It sounds like what they're talking about to me is
what we would call conscience, right that you you can
have rational deliberative processes about thinking about what's the thing

(43:00):
to do? Should I do this? Should I not do it?
But then there's also that sort of involuntary uh, that
that internal critic that you don't even really have control over.
It's just the thing that nags at you that tells
you you really shouldn't do this. That sounds like the
kind of gut feeling to me, right, Yeah, I feel
like mindfulness is a good take on from either of these,

(43:21):
Like the greater extent to which you are just mindful
of uh, the voices going on and the temptations and
what's coloring your responses uh can be a great aid
in making the correct moral choice. Yeah, Okay, I got
another one. What about forgiveness? Is there any science related
to forgiving others, not holding grudges and letting things go

(43:44):
there is, and this is one that's uh, that's that's
always fascinated me because because I I can be I'm
tired about holding onto my grudges sometimes and and I
don't want to hold onto them, you know, because grudges
are horrible. They weigh you down, They feel your thought.
You find yourself thinking about like somebody from high school
that you hated, even though like that person, they don't
even exist anymore in your life, but they're still caring

(44:06):
weight on your conscious. Just get real happy when you
see that person from my school posts something embarrassing on Facebook. Yeah. Yeah,
that's sort of thing. I feel like everyone can can
relate to this on some point. You know, you end
up keeping your Nixon enemy list in your head and
and that you cling to it, but you really you
don't want it in your life. You want to forget it.

(44:27):
And uh. There's actually a two thousand fourteen study from
the University of St. Andrews in Scotland that was published
in Psychological Science, and they found that the details of
a transgression are more susceptible to forgetting when that transgression
has been forgiven. So this is interesting when you think
of unforgiven transgressions that might play out in your head.
You know, that's essentially an unchecked off mental list because

(44:50):
remembers we've discussed before. Uncompleted tasks also stick in the mind,
right that. Let's that the zigarnic effect. Yeah, yeah, so
you can see this applying to for fiveness. I'm yet
to forgive that person, so they're right in my head
and you've gotta wake up. Yeah, you've got a box
that isn't checked yet. And or I have not avenged myself.
I have not murdered them in their sleep and dumped

(45:12):
their body in a creek exactly. I mean, no matter
what happens to that person, I don't know. I think
I would go with the Kung Fu movie mentality on
this is you haven't really solved the problem until you've
either forgiven them or they're dead, killed them or at
least dead to you. If you can just if you
can just completely like wipe them off, then then that
works too, I guess, right, And since we're not advocating

(45:34):
vengeful murder here, that the solution would seem to be forgiveness.
And then there's also a two thousand fifteen study from
the University of Missouri Columbia. They found it forgiving others
protects women from depression, but not men, thus pointing to
the importance of gender specific counseling or treatment. So they
found that older women who forgave others were less likely
to report depressive symptoms regardless of whether they felt unforgiven

(45:58):
by others themselves, while older men reported the highest levels
depression when they both forgave others and felt unforgiven by others.
So they found that They also found that, while helpful,
self forgiveness didn't act as the protector against depression in
the case of the unforgiven mental state. So this kind
of plays into the whole addags like, oh, you have

(46:18):
to forgive yourself before you can, you know, move past
some traumatic occurrence. Like there's a little truth to that,
but some people are just way too good at forgiving themselves.
Oh yeah, yeah. Some people are like that's the that's
the easy part. Like they did that the second after
it happened, right, you know, You're like, don't beat yourself up,
and they're like, yeah, good advice. And then there's also

(46:41):
some research from Ohio State University that suggests that people
who have trouble metabolizing glucose in their bodies show more
evidence of aggression and less willingness to forgive others. So
they have this, uh, this transgression in their mind and
they're just they have just more of an aggressive response
to it, and that there may be a um, A

(47:01):
body chemistry a scenario underlying it. They point out though,
that the potential problem here is the number of people
who have trouble metabolizing glucose, mainly individuals with diabetes, is
rising rapidly. From nineteen through two thousand eight, the number
of Americans with diabetes more than triple five point six
million to eighteen point one million. Well, that sounds like

(47:23):
a difficult thing to turn into a recommendation for somebody's behaviors,
Like manage your internal blood sugar so that you don't
have blood sugar problems and that will make you less
aggressive to others. I mean, it's good to have good
blood sugar in any case. Um, And here is maybe
another benefit of that, Yeah, I mean potentially boosting glucose

(47:43):
levels could reduce some you know, temporary aggressive behavior. So
I don't know, if you're feeling a little unforgiving of
someone half sucker, have a put a little extra honey
in your tea and see how that that suits you,
I guess, but sugar yourself responsible? Yes, indeed. Now out
here's another one that I found pretty interesting, offering the

(48:04):
observation that it might be true that altruism, you know,
the giving, giving to others, being kind and supportive of
other people, is encouraged by a feeling of awe. And
so this is a May paper in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology called AWE, the Small Self and
pro Social Behavior. They found that the feeling of awe

(48:26):
may cause people to behave more altruistically than they normally would.
The paper was by Paul piff, Pia Dietz, Matthew Feinberg,
and Daniel Stencado and Donker Keltner and so uh. They
offer a couple of things in terms of defining AWE.
Just a couple of quotes from the paper here. One
is that firsthand accounts of awe felt during experiences with

(48:50):
religion and spirituality, nature, art, and music often center upon
two themes, the feeling of being diminished in the presence
of something greater than the self, and the motivation to
be good to others. Uh. And and they define all
by saying, it's an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli

(49:10):
that defy one's accustomed frame of reference in some domain.
So you know what all is, he's thinking about the
scale of the universe, looking at a sunset or watching
a volcano erupt or you know, seeing things that are
vast and huge and powerful and make you realize the
smallness and powerlessness of yourself. Yea, so Pif and colleagues.

(49:34):
They first got a sample of people to complete a
questionnaire to see how susceptible to all they were. They
played a game where they were given a number of
raffle tickets and they had the opportunity to share them
with other people who didn't have raffle tickets of their own.
And the researchers found, first of all, a correlation between
people who reported a tendency to feel awe and generosity.

(49:58):
So if you're one of these people who is likely
to have experiences of awe, you're more likely to be generous.
Then they conducted four more experiments involving individual behavior tests,
so people in an experimental group would be given an
experience designed to induce AWE, such as watching a slow
motion video of droplets of water splashing into milk, or

(50:20):
watching a montage of large scale natural threats like tornadoes
and volcanoes, or being in the presence of huge eucalyptus trees,
and yeah, exactly, and the the what the koala bears?
Feeling awe at the way they grip my skin? And

(50:41):
so the control groups were subjected to neutral experiences or
experiences designed to cause other emotions like maybe pride or something,
and what they found was, Yes, the experience of self
diminishment we call awe does seem to cause people to
behave more altruistically towards others. You know, thinking back, I
can definitely relate to this idea of of of awe

(51:04):
and altruism. Uh specifically, Um, I've never been to Burning Man,
but I have been to some regional burns. You know,
there's kind of like offshoots of it. And at these places,
the ones I've been to, there's a they have a
gift economy where ideally nobody's gonna be selling this that
the other you're sharing food, or there's more of a
you know, an openness and just how you relate to

(51:26):
each other. And I remember just you know, just stepping
into that and then growing accustomed to this, uh, this
environment where suddenly you're you're smiling and saying hi to
everybody instead of you know, just sort of the head down,
eyes on your your feet approach to taking public transportation
in a large metropolitan area. Like it just it's it's
it is kind of awesome. You find yourself realizing whoa

(51:49):
we can People can live like this, People can interact
with each other in a different way and on a
smaller level, like when you when you go to help
somebody and you you're closer to like their pain, either
suffering or whatever's going in their life. That can also
be this moment of where you're you realize, you know,
it's it's not all about me, it's also see the whole. Yeah. Yeah,

(52:11):
you kind of do that powers attend zoom out from
your own life. You know. What this study reminded me
of was something I had read about in the past,
known as the overview effect and literature about it, which
which has to do with a commonly reported feeling that
that astronauts talk about once they've been to space and

(52:32):
seeing the Earth from above. Yeah. Yeah, the according to
YESA and NASSA reports, we're talking about euphoric feelings that
involved quote new insight into the meaning of life and
the unity of mankind A Paulo fourteen astronaut edgar Mitchell
described this sensation as the overview effect. And uh, and
I and I have a nice summer of this from

(52:54):
Discovery Space um writer and I believe I still had
editor over their een O'Neil who used to used to
work with he explains. He explains it as as follows. Quote.
He described this and sensation gave him a profound sense
of connectedness with a feeling of bliss and timelessness. He
was overwhelmed by the experience. He became profoundly aware that
each and every atom in the universe was connected in

(53:16):
some way, and on seeing Earth from space, he had
an understanding that all the humans, animals, and systems were
a part of the same thing, a synergistic whole. It
was an interconnected euphoria because the Earth is so small
and and we're up above it in the spaceship. Essentially, well, yeah,
I mean it's hard to imagine anything more literally all

(53:39):
inspiring than that, right, I mean that that's almost perfectly
the definition of awe Uh. Realizing the smallness being diminished
in the face of of incomparably vast phenomena when you're
in space and you suddenly realized that Earth isn't the universe,
it's a it's a tiny rock, and where these tiny

(54:01):
creatures occupying the surface of the rock. Yeah, I can
certainly see how that would be sort of the ultimate
experience of awe, and how it could cause one to
I don't know, to just allow all of the petty
squabbles of human life too, to dissolve into this this nothingness. Yeah,
I mean it. It's one of those things that interrupts

(54:23):
the sort of me, me me narrative, that default mode
network that goes on in her mind. It kind of
comes back to mindfulness, you know, just getting out of
your own story. And if it takes going into space
to do that, if it takes helping somebody out that
I'm delivering a meal or something engaging in some level
of altruistic behavior, then uh, then do it. Yeah, give

(54:44):
it a give it a try. That would be my recommendation,
not only to everyone else. I'm not, you know, just
speaking on a podium here, like I I want to
take that on myself as a challenge for the new
year in a in an unofficial way, and not until February.
It sounds like a good one. Uh. I want to
encourage myself to be more altruistic by standing at the
lip of a volcano and active one staring into it

(55:06):
more often, more often at least than I do now.
Um So, so we've we've talked about these studies and
as we said at the beginning, we I mean, we
can't even come close to covering the full breadth of
studies in this area. Yeah, it's ongoing. We're gonna see
a countless more in the years of fall how how
psychology effects and influences moral behavior. But that's sort of

(55:26):
just a sampling of the kind of research that's out there.
And so I'm wondering if we can take any of
the stuff we've looked at in this episode, the findings
we've found it and turn them into strategies for tricking
your brain into doing good. Well. I have a little
bit of advice here, and this this comes from Charles
do Higgs The Power of Habit, and he points out

(55:50):
that every habit starts with a psychological pattern called a
habit loop. And there it's a three part process. So
first there's a queue or trigger that tells your brain
to go into automatic mode and out of behavior unfold.
And then there's routine, and finally there's rewards. Something that
your your brain likes, helps it remember the habit loop
in the future. Uh So, habit making behavior. All this

(56:11):
ties to a part of the brain called the basil ganglia.
This is where we find emotions and memories and pattern recognition,
and the basil ganglia takes behavior and turns it into
an automatic routine, kind of like a hot key for
the human body. This this is what happens when this
cemula presents itself the macro. Yeah, and that could be
and when we say action, it could be an action,
but we could also be just like this is the

(56:32):
way I think in response to something. UM Now decisions
on the other hand, or maybe a different part of
the brain called the prefrontal cortex. But as soon as
behavior becomes automatic, the decision making part of your brain
goes into a sort of sleep mode. And and and
and uh and it's important to know that environment and
forces as well. So like if you go on a vacation,

(56:52):
if you travel or go just go to a different environment.
Um this can mix things up because you're changing the
stimuli around you. And it's one of the reasons that
they aations are a great place, a great time to
focus on changing a habit because you're stepping outside of
your normal stimuli. I think that sounds true. I found
that to be true in my life. I think life

(57:12):
changing decisions are often made at a time when you
are not under your normal circumstances. Yeah. Um, I think
this is This is an interesting way of looking at it.
And one thing you could take away from this is
that if you're talking about making deliberate decisions to change
your moral behavior, they're not going to have to be
deliberate decisions forever, right, right, They would just have to

(57:33):
be You'd have to make that deliberate decision enough times
long enough to establish a habit. And then once you've
established a habit, you don't have to be so deliberate
about it anymore. It's just the new way you do things, right,
But just remember that the old way you do things
and the environment in which you do them is going
to be a hurdle to overcome in making that change,

(57:56):
because you know, whatever you're planning to do stand in
the edge of volcano, or share half your sandwich will
with someone who's hungry. Uh, they're still gonna be that
temptation to set in front of the Xbox and play
a game instead when you see that little green eye
staring at you. But maybe if the game you're playing
on the Xbox is so awe inspiring that it really

(58:16):
does diminish your sense of self, it would make you
more altruistic. Maybe that sounds like a good a good
uh premise for a study. Well, let's see. Let's let's
design a video game to hit all of these features
we've talked about. So you have a game that at
the you have to enter your credit card information. In
the game, it gives you all inspiring scenarios where you

(58:38):
you see amazing, cosmic, powerful events that you have no
control over. And then you're you're faced with a single
anecdotal case of a person who's suffering rather than the
whole statistical overview of the problem. And then the game
forces you to endure a ritual pain ceremony. You have
to go through a communal ceremony with that her it's

(59:00):
your body. Then the game connects you with other users
who do something nice for you, and you get to
experience the contagion of generosity. H Then the game asks
you to report your moral behavior to your social network,
but gives you uh and lets you report, you know,
whatever you want, but gives you enough time that you
can sit there and be deliberate and think about it

(59:21):
so that you're honest instead of immediately defaulting to cheat mode.
All right, well, you know, I think throw in a
few more cut scenes and we have the next metal
Gear game. A yeah, yeah, metal Gear Charity. Charitable Snake
is your character and it's it's particular, particular game. Now,
now what kind of charitable organization would would a Metal

(59:41):
Gear game? I don't know. It's a complicated question. They
really get into some tense uh. Like there's a lot
of tense real life stuff wrapped up in some of
the more recent installments, right so I haven't played them.
I don't know. I would guess it would maybe maybe
relate to, uh, I mean, refugee scenarios of work, foreign regions.
I mean, they're all they all deal with kind of

(01:00:02):
guerilla situations and international wrongdoing. So do they still have
giant robots? Would you build a giant robot that feeds
the hungry. I think they're still a giant robots. They
tend to occur at the end of the game, and
I burn out before I get so I see. So
they're just kind of like the gods of metal gear
that I never actually witnessed. Okay, well, uh, as we
mentioned earlier a couple of times, you know this, this

(01:00:23):
is a big field, and maybe this is a field
where we will have the chance to return to it
in the future. There I'm sure gonna be plenty more
studies coming out all the time about psychology and moral behavior,
and maybe we can revisit the topic then. Yeah. And
you know, on the subject of charity, supposed to be
something interesting to discuss in a maybe a future listener
mail topic. If there's a particular charity that's near and

(01:00:44):
dear to your heart, you know, like a vetted charity
of some sort, let us know about it. Oh yeah,
kind of fun to share these out and spread the
word about about some of the causes out there in
the world. Yeah, please do. And one last thing at
this time of year, good luck with your New Year's resolution,
whatever it is, self serving or not. Yeah, and if
you don't get it in January, just pick it up
the next month for Chinese New Year. That's what I

(01:01:06):
do in the meantime. Check out Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's we find. All of our episodes
are videos, blog post links out to social media accounts
were we're on Facebook and Twitter as Blow the Mind,
We're in tumbler as Stuff to Blow your Mind. Follow
us on those uh on those formats if you use them,
and if you want to get in touch with us,
was in a feedback on this or other recent episodes?
Or if you want to let us know what your

(01:01:27):
favorite charity is or what your New Year's resolution is,
you can email us at Blow the Mind the house,
stuff works dot com. Well more on this and passons
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com

(01:02:01):
two p.