The Neuroscience of Optimism with Dr. Tali Sharot
The challenges of updating our beliefs, and practical strategies to help mitigate the negative effects of cognitive biases.
The latest episode of the Decision Education Podcast just dropped and I’m so excited to share my conversation with Tali Sharot, a professor of neuroscience at The Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry at University College London and on the faculty of the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. She is also the director of the Affective Brain Lab.
In this podcast, we explore her groundbreaking research on optimism bias, memory, decision-making, and human behavior. Tali shares how the brain processes information, the adaptive functions of optimism bias, and the impact of habituation on motivation.
A transcript of our conversation is below. You can find the show notes here.
Thanks to First Round Capital for supporting The Decision Education Podcast—empowering leaders to make choices that shape our future.
Transcipt
Producer’s Note: This transcript was created using AI. Please excuse any errors.
Annie: I’m so excited to welcome my guest today, Tali Sharot. Tali is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research integrates neuroscience, behavioral economics, and psychology to study how emotion and motivation influence people’s beliefs and decisions. She is also director of the Affective Brain Lab, a neuroscience and psychology-based lab that studies the influence of emotion on normal cognitive function.
She is currently a professor of cognitive neuroscience in the department of experimental psychology and the Max Planck UCL Center for Computational Psychiatry at University College London. She is also on the faculty of the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. Tali is a graduate of New York University where she earned her master’s in psychology and a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience.
She is the recipient of numerous awards for both her research and writing. Tali was listed as one of the 15 exemplary female Israeli born scientists alive, and her two TED Talks have been viewed a combined total of 15 million times. Thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your journey to where you are now?
Tali: Yeah, sure. So I’m a professor of cognitive neuroscience. I study human behavior, and it’s a combination really of psychology and brain science, and I mix in some behavioral economics as well. I study how people make decisions, how motivations and emotions affect those decisions and social interactions, how we process information, choose which information to seek out and really at different levels. So my lab looks at all the levels from just like doing pharmacology, to like looking at the brain system with fMRI, to looking at behavior as well and then also working with companies and governments also for the implications of our work and other people’s work as well in the field.
Annie: So what got you interested in this topic in the first place?
Tali: The topic of the brain at large? I think that’s an interest in, I mean, that started really early, you know, probably when I was a teenager. It’s an interest in understanding people, sometimes in understanding yourself, but I think for me, maybe it was just understanding people around me because really anything that we feel, that we think, that we do, it all starts in the brain or the interaction between our brain and everything else that’s around us.
So really understanding the brain is understanding so much. And it’s just so fascinating. I mean, it’s a—such a complex system, of course. It was always one of the most intriguing questions to me and the most intriguing question that I could imagine spending my life investigating. So that—that was it.
And in terms of like the specifics, I started my Ph.D. many, many, many years ago, studying how emotion alters memory. And I was always interested in memory, perhaps, because at the time, actually, decision wasn’t a huge thing within psychology. I just wasn’t, like, aware, and there weren’t many people to choose from to work in kind of a lab.
But I was working in a lab that was studying—I was interested in memory, and my mentor was actually interested in emotional memory. So that’s how I started my Ph.D., trying to understand how people remember. Mostly, actually, negative and traumatic events, and how—what happens in the brain. I started my Ph.D., was in New York, and shortly after I started, there was 9/11. And because my main question was how people remember traumatic events, that led me to a study of actually interviewing and scanning people who were in New York City on the day in different points, like people who are actually there in like ground zero, seeing the things happen versus you’re far away, so you’re just hearing the things happen, and how does that all affect the way that you encode everything and then retrieve it? And there’s a well known phenomena by which people, when they experience emotional events, when you recall it, it feels quite vivid and quite like you’re pressing play on a videotape and it just, you know—you know, that’s how it’s in your brain. But in fact, it’s not as accurate as you think it is. So, because our memories—every time we retrieve it, we kind of change it a little bit. And we change this because we retrieve it at a different time, a different day, so it just changes, but we are not quite aware of all these changes and the emotion makes it feel so real.
And so we really think it happened the way that we remembered it, despite the fact that we remembered it in different ways and different times. So I was interested in that and what’s happening in the brain. And we were looking at how the amygdala, which is really important for emotional arousal, how that changes the activity of a nearby region, which is important for memory, which is called the hippocampus, and how they interact to establish these memories that feel so vivid when you recall them.
So that was my Ph.D. From there, I went to do a very short postdoc at Harvard. And when I got there I learned that people were examining how we imagine the future. And I thought that was a really interesting topic, that maybe I could study how emotion changes the way you imagine the future. And specifically how you imagine traumatic events.
Because that’s what I was interested in. So I started my first study, which was asking people simply to imagine negative events that could happen to them in the future, and I gave them specific events that can happen. And I wanted to record what’s happening in the brain when they imagine these negative events and compare that to how you remember events, how you imagine neutral events.
And that’s when the first problem that I encountered was that when I told people to imagine these negative events, they would tend to change them and make them much better. So for example, I would say, “Imagine breaking up with your partner.” And one person said, “I imagine breaking up with my girlfriend and then finding a better one.” Or I said, “Imagine you get stuck out of your apartment with no keys.” So people automatically solve the problem, right?
They said, “Okay, I call the landlady, she comes, she opens the door.” And even when I asked them to imagine neutral events, they turned them into these spectacular, wonderful events. So I said, “Imagine going to get a haircut.” It seemed like not that exciting, right? And someone said, “I went to get a haircut at my favorite place in Brooklyn, and all my friends came, and I donated my hairs to Locks of Love, and then we went to celebrate.” A haircut in the future was, you know, a reason for celebration. So that was really upsetting to me, because I wanted to study what happens in the brain when you imagine traumatic events, but people, you know, they change these negative events to just positive events. So how was I going to study this?
So I tried to change the prompts, and it took me a while to kind of stop and think, actually, this is not working. But it’s much more interesting that my original question was, because what I was tapping into was sort of this phenomenon known as optimism bias, which I don’t think I was acutely aware of, and it was more within the behavioral economics.
And I was more in, kind of, psychology, neuroscience. But once I looked into why that’s happening and realized the connection with this other field in behavioral economics relating to optimism and optimism bias, which is imagining the future better than the past and the present, that took me into the route of studying the optimism bias, which led to my first book and also then to move more towards behavioral economics and decision-making and, you know, predictions of the future, which, you know, for me, ended up being so interesting. And I left memory mostly behind.
Annie: Let me just start here. This is just a question for myself as you were talking, just kind of a way I’ve sort of thought about when people are thinking about the future. In terms of the areas of the brain that are recruited into imagining the future. My question is, is the hippocampus recruited into that? Because I kind of think about—imagining the future is actually memories of the future. Does that make sense, like memories of the future? So that the hippocampus will be recruited into that type of activity to not just thinking about the past. But I could be totally wrong about that. Asking you now.
Tali: No, you’re totally right. And actually I jumped over this important part because the reason I went from studying memory to studying imagining the future is because of this idea that actually the two things are very much related. They rely on the same neural structures with the hippocampus being one of the core, because hippocampus is core for memory. It’s also core for imagining the future. And in fact, imagination of the future involves taking pieces of information and evidence from our old past, but also people—things that you heard about that you read that you saw on TV, right—and recombining these little pieces of information and events to create something new, which is your imagination of the future.
So it uses the same system. And in fact, many people believe that we have memory in order to be able to imagine and plan for the future. We don’t have memory in order to just, you know, for nostalgia reasons, but in order for us to be able to imagine the future, so we are prepared, right? So we can make better decisions. We can simulate what the future may be, what could potentially be the outcomes of our actions based on what we have experienced in the past. And so we have the memory system in the brain exactly for that. And that’s why I jumped from memory to like imagination and future predictions because they are very much related.
Annie: So what we could say then is, imagining the future is recombining the past in some way.
Tali: To create something new. Yeah, it’s an interesting question to see, like to ask, can you imagine something that’s completely, completely different that has nothing to do with any information that you’ve ever encountered? I don’t think so. I think probably anything, even if it seems like it’s totally new, it’s some kind of odd combination of pieces of evidence and information that you’ve had encoded.
Annie: Okay, good. That was, that was the first thing that came to mind. So I actually want to, I want to jump right into optimism bias because I think the work that you’ve done on this is so incredibly interesting, but also, you know, like from my perspective, a little bit perplexing. So let me explain why it’s perplexing for me. For me, the way that I think about it is, look, the better decisions you make, the better in the long term your future will turn out, right? So the more accuracy in your decisions—that’s going to accrue better outcomes over time. And when I’m talking about, like, accuracy in your decisions, what I’m sort of thinking about is, well, at the core of every decision that you make is a forecast. And the more accurate those forecasts of the future, the happier you’re going to be over time, right? Because you’re going to get better outcomes.
So, we could think about like a simple thing of, like, if I’m trying to decide how much time to leave to get to the airport. It would be good for me to be accurate and not experience optimism bias, which may make me miss my flight, for example. And you could think about that applying to a whole bunch of different things, like if we’re overly optimistic about how healthy we’ll be in the future, maybe our health habits today are going to suffer for that, and so on and so forth.
Okay. And I think Don Moore, who obviously has done a lot of work in optimism bias, says if you’re optimistic and you have to jump a seven-foot crevasse and the farthest you’ve ever jumped is six and three-quarters feet, optimism might be really good for that, right? Because it might help you believe that you can actually make it when you have to.
But it’s really bad if the crevasse is 25 feet. And it gets you to jump when you actually aren’t capable of it, which I thought was kind of interesting. So here, you know, I think, okay, well, if you’re more rational and you’re making better forecasts, then that’s going to make you happier because obviously you’re going to have better outcomes. But your work has shown that people who suffer from optimism bias aren’t actually suffering. That they’re actually happier. Can you talk about that?
Tali: Yeah, yeah, so you’re basically asking like, you know, is optimism bias—is it adaptive? And if so, why? Most people have an optimism bias. So optimism bias, we define it as overestimating the likelihood of experiencing good events in your life. So professional success, happy marriage, and underestimating the likelihood of negative events. It could be an accident, the likelihood of getting an illness, and so on. And we see this in 80 percent of the population.
So all around the world, different ages, different genders, so it’s very common. It’s also common in other species, not just humans, which means, by the way, every time you see it in different cultures, in different species, that suggests it probably has something adaptive, right?
And then the other thing that you mentioned is, well, we do see it in 80 percent of the population, but in most, it is mild. So it’s not that I’m going to think I’m going to jump 25 feet when all I can jump is six. I might think I will jump six and a half, seven. Okay. So then the question becomes, is mild optimism bias, which we see in most individuals, is that adaptive?
So the answer is a little bit complex. On one hand it can be adaptive in many situations for many reasons. One is that if you expect positive events in your future, that is good for your mental health, right? I think, oh, I’m going to do fine. I’m going to find that love of my life. I’m going to get that promotion. And so that has a positive effect on my well-being. A positive effect on my well-being in and of itself is good. It is related to survival. It does have positive effects on your physical health, right? Less anxiety and stress. That’s good for many different physical conditions. So we do see that on average people with optimism are more likely to survive longer and get over illnesses quicker than people who don’t have optimism, all else being equal.
And so one reason is for this kind of, like, positive thinking, which leads to reduction in stress and so on. The other is related to motivation. If I think my company is going to succeed, then you actually put more effort into it. Right? If you think I am going to get that promotion, you put in the effort in order to get it. If you think, well, I’m never going to get the promotion, you don’t try. And by not trying, well, by definition, you’re not going to succeed. We think my company’s not going to work out. Then you may not even get up in the morning to try and do anything. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So these are the positive advantages of the optimism bias. Good for your mental health, and therefore good for your physical health on average, and also motivation, which ends up being good for success in different domains. And indeed, the studies show, all those being equal, optimists are more likely to succeed in many domains. Sports, academia, business, and so on.
Okay, but obviously there is a disadvantage, which is, I’m underestimating my risk, I might not take precautionary action, not wear a helmet when I go biking, not put a belt on in the car, not go to a medical screening, right? So these are the disadvantages, because I’m underestimating my risk, not taking precautionary action, trying to jump 25 feet, but all I can jump is six, and therefore falling and dying.
So those are the negatives. So there’s positives and negatives. And so the common thought within many scholars has usually been, well, okay, there’s advantages and disadvantages, probably the advantages were greater than the disadvantages, which is why over evolution, we have evolved to be optimistically biased as other species as well.
Daniel Dennett, who recently passed away, said it is a design feature. Optimism is a design feature. And all that is good and, well, and there’s something true about that. But then there’s another aspect, which is whether it’s advantageous or not probably depends on your environment. If you’re in a relatively safe environment, like you and I are in today, then perhaps the advantages over the disadvantages, it enhances our motivation, it keeps us feeling well, and so we keep trying, the more we try, the more we succeed, and all of that. But if I put you in a really dangerous environment rife with threats, there are lions coming your way, you should probably not hugely underestimate your risk, right?
If you’re in an environment where you need to jump 25 and all you do is say it’s alright, you have to do that to survive all the time. If you can imagine these dangerous environments, probably in these cases, and actually there are simulations using just computational simulation showing that this is true.
There’s a nice paper in nature showing this, that it does depend on your environment. And so we started from that point and we said, well, perhaps what’s adaptive is not whether we are optimistically biased or not. Perhaps what’s adaptive is that we can turn it relatively on and off in response to the environment that we’re in. Meaning, as long as you’re in a relatively safe environment, there are cognitive and neural mechanisms that we can talk about that cause you to be optimistically biased. Mild optimism bias. But if I put you in a threatening environment, what will happen? You will have a stress response, a physiological stress response. That physiological stress response will change the way that you process information, changing what cognitive mechanisms we know lead to optimism, and as a result reduce it or eliminate it. And so we have shown that to be true if we stress people out. And I’ll tell you about this experiment in a second. The optimism bias, the mechanism that leads to a temporarily change. and you don’t show an optimism bias. But you’re in a nice safe, relaxed environment, you show it. So it seems that what’s adaptive is our ability to turn this on and off in response to the environment in a way that’s adaptive in general.
Now of course humans can, this could be a problem, humans can feel like they’re in a threatening environment and they can feel stressed when they’re not. Right, right. This is a problem in our modern world where you’re going to Starbucks and there’s a large line and then people get stressed when they shouldn’t, right? Or people with mental health problems, where they are inaccurately perceiving the environment as freckle when it isn’t and in fact we know that mental health problems such as depression can lead to pessimism bias.
And just to quickly tell you about this experiment that we did that showed that stress can turn your optimism bias relatively on and off. By changing our environment, is we had two experiments. One, we had people come into the lab and we wanted—they’re undergraduate students—we wanted to stress them out. We told them that they’re going to have to give a talk in front of everyone else. About a surprise topic that we will give them. We will record them. We will rate them. We will put it on YouTube. So our students got quite stressed. We measure skin-conductance response, cortisol response, we know that there’s stress and then we gave them some of our regular tests. And indeed, temporarily, optimism bias was eliminated when there’s stress.
But if they came and we didn’t do all of this, like stress, you have to give a talk, they showed the optimism bias in our task. We did the same with firefighters in the state of Colorado. We tested them during the day while they were on duty, but some days, they were relaxed, they were in the station, nothing happened, they showed the optimism bias in our tasks. Other days, threatening environments, the optimism bias goes away in accordance to your stress response. Our theory, based on our studies, is that one reason that people do have an optimism bias, is because they don’t learn as well from the negative events, versus from the positive events. So they update their beliefs more when I give you unexpected positive information than unexpected negative. So for example if I ask you like how many people are going to watch this podcast and you tell me like, I don’t know, 50, and I say, you know my data shows that this specific one is gonna be like 150,000, so much higher than what you think, you might say oh, okay. Maybe she knows what she’s talking about. So now you updated to like 130,000, but if I tell you, you know, my data show it’s only like 2,000 people are going to watch this, you might say, ah, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about and be less likely to update the information based on the negative that I just gave you.
So basically what we’ve shown again and again and again is that on average, people update their beliefs more on unexpected positive than negative information unless we stress them out. Unless we stress them out. Yeah. We stress them out, then they start becoming hypervigilant on negative and this difference in how they update goes away.
And people with severe depression, they actually update more for the negative. So if I tell them, no one’s going to watch your podcast, it’s going to take you an hour to get your son from camp. Then they will be like, Ooh, I’m updating my beliefs. And they can tell them everybody will watch it.
Annie: They’re like, nah, I don’t believe you. If we’re overly optimistic, we’re obviously introducing error into the decision, which may make us be way too risky, for example. Because we’re just like our forecast is off and now we’re taking on more risk than we really ought to be. And that’s okay if things are pretty good. You just have more tolerance for maybe taking on a little bit too much risk. But if things aren’t so good, then you should be less tolerant of that. And I don’t know, it feels like there’s a relationship between that and sort of like what’s the impact of getting it wrong that I sort of think about is this thing called framework is this mental model for figuring out like, how much do I care about getting this exactly right in terms of the forecast that I’m making?
Tali: So people tend to believe they have more control over their own future, which is why they believe I can steer the wheel in the right direction, which is why they’re optimistic. But interestingly, they are not optimistic about world issues. So we are optimistic about our own future and perhaps the future of our families, but we’re actually pessimistic on average about, like, global questions, where our leaders are taking us and so on. So we call this private optimism, but public despair. And we, I think one of the reasons is a sense of control because I feel I have a sense of control over my own future, my small little world. I don’t think I have control over global issues, climate change, you know, what’s going on with politics and war. And so I feel like, Oh, I don’t have any control. And so I don’t have this kind of idea that my actions can take me in the right direction. And so that’s why we have this kind of dichotomy between our perceptions about public things and private things.
Annie: So a couple of things, I mean, this reminds me, I mean, I’ve seen a lot of polling recently or people think that their economic situation is really good, but the economy is very bad, but like people were pulled like across, so like everybody kind of thinks their situation is pretty good. But they think the economy’s bad, which obviously is data that doesn’t feel like it should match up. But that’s kind of what you’re talking about here. I assume this is true not just for things that you’re thinking about that are like on the world stage, but also just generally for other people who aren’t related to you. Right? So I imagine we’re overly optimistic about our children. But other people’s children, not so much, right?
Tali: Exactly. You’re optimistic about yourself, not necessarily about the person sitting next to you, unless the person sitting next to you is your child. And there’s so many interesting pieces of data like this. So with AI, out of every four people, three said that AI will take more jobs than it will create. So that’s 75%. But only one in four, only 25 percent believe their own job is at risk. So there’s so much, or in the UK, people tend to rate the health system, the NHS, as pretty low, but their own private branch is relatively good. So it’s like, my branch is good, but the rest of the country, it’s not so good.
Annie: So that’s the same thing as my economics are good, but like the economy’s bad. Right. Exactly. So if we’re kind of miscalibrated on these, is it a little different than like, is it adaptive for me personally, in terms of me like trying harder and so on and so forth, versus that kind of reverberating across issues that involve lots and lots of people across a global stage where we’re kind of getting these things wrong.
Tali: So sometimes my prediction about myself ends up affecting the global situation. So for example, financial markets. The crash of 2008, so many economists named the optimism bias as one of the reasons for the collapse, because it was the bias of many, many, many, many individuals, right? People buying, renting or buying the real estate, people in government, each, you know, advisors, so the bias of many individuals just about perhaps just their own financial future and the fact that like, can I take a loan? Can I not? Right? Right. And so that creates a bubble and we see that often when, like, things are relatively good, actually the market can overreact and optimism bias has something to do with it.
And in fact, when the market starts going down, even if it’s a little bit, or there’s events in the world that are stressing people out, then we can see actually an overreaction in the opposite direction because now people are starting to stress out more than they should. Now they’re focusing on the negative information for which there’s a lot of. And now we’re losing this kind of like I’m learning more from the positive and negative if anything it could reverse right.
So now my predictions are worse than they should be and we have an overreaction of the market in the other direction, overly pessimistic than what we should. So this is a case where my predictions are just about myself. But together they create an effect that’s quite large. Then when it comes about what are my predictions about, like, the world, like climate change, for example. So here, in fact, we tend to have the pessimistic bias that I was talking about. So when it comes to the predictions about global issues, if anything, I think they are mostly a little bit maybe toward pessimism. And so that can impact us, I guess, but in the other way, it’s not like overtaking risks, right. So I think maybe it’s in Kahneman’s book. He talks about the Sydney Opera House. So that’s a case where they hugely underestimated how long the project will take by years and years and years. Hugely underestimated how much it costs. By millions, I mean, maybe it was a billion, I don’t know, but huge amounts at the time.
And the way that he describes it is, well, each person that was part of the process just had a small bias, right? So I’m like, I’m the architect, how long my part will take? I’m like the engineer, like, how will we try? So everyone is just like, they’re slightly biased about their own part and underestimating how long it will take by only maybe a few weeks, maybe a month, but then you take everyone together and it’s a process. So now months, months and months and months accumulate and accumulate and I am making the budget for like materials and they’re making the budget for whatever. So every one of us is making a small mistake, but then it comes to—all of these kinds of mistakes come together and they’re systematic mistakes. If some of us were like, I’m underestimating, the other one’s overestimating, well, it cancels each other out. And that’s why even if this is smaller, we’re not talking global markets, even if it’s smaller, we could still have these problems.
Annie: This brings me to another topic though that you’ve thought about a lot because we can think about you know, sticking to projects in the face of bad information, right? Like I’ve got a public works project and I’m sticking to it because I’m really optimistic versus the Sydney Opera House. And I’m now like way over budget and it’s taking years longer, but you know, some of that is caused by, you know, this mild optimism that we have, not just in the initial planning, but you know, in the subsequent decisions about whether we should stick to it in the face of negative information.
But it’s not just about, like, sticking to building opera houses, right? We also have beliefs. And I think that one of the things that is so incredibly frustrating for people in the environment that we live in, particularly because it’s so visible, is how intractable people’s beliefs are, even in the face of all sorts of information that their beliefs aren’t true. And I know that you’ve done a lot of work on this. Can you sort of talk about sort of what’s going on with this inability to change minds? And I think for people who are just observing somebody else and not thinking about themselves, in the face of really obvious facts.
Tali: Yeah. So, okay. So this is the well known confirmation bias. So I’m less likely to change my belief when you give me evidence that is contrary to my strong-held beliefs. And then if you give me evidence that supports it. So I become more confident if you give me evidence. I’m also more likely to go out and seek information that confirms my belief than information that disconfirms it. Yeah, so that’s like a well-known phenomenon. But if you think about, okay, so why, again, why do we have a confirmation bias to see it in all cultures, all ages, and so on? Because, on average, what you believe is true. So, usually when people talk about beliefs, and then they kind of think about these political beliefs, or, you know, religious beliefs. But in fact, most of the beliefs in your head are just about the sun comes out in the morning, right? So, I don’t know, like nothing’s going to fall on me from the sky. It’s like most of your beliefs about the world are actually correct. And it would not make sense to change your belief every time that someone says something to the contrary, right?
Because most likely what they’re saying is untrue, or, you know, if it goes again, so having this bias makes sense. You shouldn’t change your belief every time that there’s a piece of information. However, of course, the problem then emerges that there is a subset of our beliefs that isn’t true or that we wouldn’t know. We don’t even know what the ground truth is. And then for those things, we still are unlikely to change our beliefs with contrary evidence, and that’s where the problem emerges, but I mean, I think that explains why we have a confirmation bias, because that’s a good way for our brain to work in general, and then it creates a problem in these specific situations, which are more rare, not that they’re not important, they’re important, and they are more visible maybe to us, because we don’t usually talk about them and then we have a million of beliefs that we have that are obviously true.
Annie: So, if we talk about belief updating, you know, you talk about this in your TED talk, which I highly recommend people go listen to. Again, it will be linked in the show notes. Let’s say that you asked me what do I think the chances are that I get divorced or I get cancer or something like that. And I say it’s zero percent, and going to get divorced, and I’ve only five percent I’m going to get cancer. And then you show me data that says for people like me, 40 percent of people get divorced or for people like me actually my chances of getting cancer are 30%. So this is a spot where I should probably update my beliefs.
So it would actually probably be helpful because it might cause me to engage in behaviors that could mitigate my risk. So in the case of getting married, maybe I get a prenup which is going to make divorce much cleaner and less stressful. And in the case of cancer, maybe I’m more aggressive about going and getting screened, which then lowers my chances that I’m actually going to die of cancer if I happen to get it, because I’m going to check it earlier, right?
So that’s a spot we would really love for people to update their beliefs. But to your point, people don’t really, not when it’s bad, right? So I guess you’re saying if I think my chances of getting cancer are 50%, you tell me the base rate is 30%, then I’m very willing to update my beliefs, but not in the reverse direction, which is bad for mitigating risk. So, you know, what do you suggest to get, you know, to get people to actually update their beliefs, particularly in situations where it matters like that?
Tali: Mm-hmm. So I think what really matters at the end of the day is our actions, not our beliefs. What really matters is that you go to that medical screening. What really matters is that, you know, you do whatever makes your spouse happy and makes the marriage good, regardless of what you believe. And that is probably easier to do than changing your beliefs. It’s not that the two things are not related. Our beliefs will alter our actions. But when it comes to changing biases, it’s very, very hard to change these biases, the confirmation bias and the optimism bias. They have been ingrained in us over evolution. And so it’s very, very hard to change. However, we can figure out ways to change our actions without changing our beliefs. And that means when it comes to optimism bias, for example, it means, well, I can have my overly, like, happy beliefs, which maybe keep me, like, mentally healthy and yet take precautionary actions.
And part of the way that we could do this in our individual lives, so other ways we can do it on a company and government level, but in our individual lives by putting policies in place and using the other biases that we know are happening in the brain. So for example, something simple, you can put a policy in place saying, let’s say your problem is you don’t put a helmet on when you bike because you think you’re going to be fine. You’ll be like, fine, I’m going to be fine. But every time I don’t put a helmet on when I get to the office, I have to put money into a charity that I don’t like. Every time when I put a helmet on, I give myself a small treat, maybe a chocolate, little Hershey bar or whatever, when I get to the office. So basically you’re using some other information, some other knowledge about human behavior in the brain, which is a reward, works to, like, strengthen some actions and punishments or weaken them in order to, like, shape your own actions to overcome it.
So the key really here is to know your biases, then to figure out through, okay, given that I have an optimism bias or given that I have a confirmation bias, what are the potential negative outcomes of this? Maybe it’s like you don’t go to medical screenings, right? Okay. So what can I do to make myself go to medical screenings without changing my beliefs? Because that’s going to be a little bit too difficult, right? Or a confirmation bias is problematic because it causes me to just follow people who are similar to me, right? And so what is a consequence of that? Perhaps I get misinformation about health. Let’s say, perhaps I’m like an anti-vaxxer or whatever. You may say, okay, let’s just go in and like, you could either do it yourself or use an algorithm that automatically will get you exposure to other types of influences and thoughts.
So I think for most of these problems that we think through, we can find solutions. For example, let’s say you’re making professional decisions and because you, it’s your company, so obviously you have a huge optimism bias. That can cause you to take too much risk, for example, take precautionary actions. You can then take people who don’t have skin in the game to help you make a decision, right? That will look, you’ll be like, this is my data, this is my conclusion. Okay, you look at it. You don’t have skin in the game, it’s not your company, and you say what you think, or be involved in the decision yourself. So there’s a lot of these kinds of things that we can do if we are aware of the likely biases and errors that we make.
Annie: So it sounds like what you’re saying is, you can know what the biases are, because that’s helpful for understanding that there’s something that you might want to, you know, protect yourself against in the future because we’re more willing to do things to protect a future version of, like, it’s almost like the person sitting next to me might make some mistakes. I’m willing to admit that a future version of me might make some mistakes, even if I’m not going to, so sort of recognize, look, I’m biased. I know that there are problems that might occur from that. I know that knowing about it probably isn’t going to be very helpful. Just that that’s the only thing, right?
If it’s just, I know about confirmation bias. It’s a start, but it won’t solve the problem. It’s not going to make you not do it. So instead, what it can do is get you to start to put some structures in place. For example, like precommitment contracts, where you say, I’m committing to certain things in the future. So, if I imagine that when I’m really emotional, I’m probably going to eat really crappy food. You know, and I know that that’s just going to be a problem, then I can put in some kind of precommitment contract. It could be something really strong, like I could actually throw all the stuff out of my house, that can make sure it’s not there for me to have, although a little harder with things like DoorDash. But I could also commit to somebody else who’s going to help me with those decisions that’s going to help hold me accountable. I can do those pairings that you’re talking about. Katy Milkman has done tons of work on that, right?
So if I have a TV show that I love, the only time I can watch it is while I’m walking on the treadmill, as an example, it’s just more likely to get me to follow through. So it seems like there’s just a really good broad lesson in there, which is don’t trust that you’re not going to do it because you know about it. There’s extra steps that you have to do to protect yourself against the errors that you might make in the future.
Just as a last thing, I just want to talk a little bit about habituation because you wrote a whole book about it with Cass Sunstein called Look Again. So can you, you know, talk a little bit about habituation because you know, you talk about this idea of where most of us, 80 percent of us, are a little bit too optimistic, not necessarily a ton, but a little bit too optimistic about thinking about our futures. But when we make forecasts about the future, it seems like we also imagine that if, like, happy events happen to us, it’s going to have this huge impact that’s going to be long-lasting. If sad events happen to us, it’s going to have a huge impact that is long-lasting. When we change certain things and we get really excited about them, we think it’s going to be that way forever. But that’s not true. Can you talk a little bit about what is habituation and why does it matter for the kinds of things that you think about?
Tali: So habituation is our tendency to respond less and less to things that are constant or repeated. And really, I mean, most of the work started with, like, perceptual. So you go into a room full of cigarette smoke. It’s really overwhelming at the beginning, but within 20 minutes, you’re not even going to be able to detect a smoke smell. Your olfactory neurons just stop responding because it’s just the same stimulus. So that’s kind of the basic work, whether it’s smell, whether it’s vision, whether it’s temperature, you jump into a pool, it’s really cold over time and you get used to it.
And so just as we stop responding to perceptual things, we also stop responding to more complex things in our life, and having less of an emotional response to them. And they could be good things. We all have some good things in our life. Perhaps it’s a loving relationship, a comfortable home, an interesting job, but because they’ve been there for so long, maybe we don’t notice them on a daily basis, so they don’t bring us as much joy on a daily basis as they should, but it’s also true for the negative events around us. There could be some negative things, both in society and our personal lives. So there could be racism, sexism, cracks in our personal relationship, inefficiencies in the workplace. But because it’s been there for so long, some of these things we don’t even notice. And if we don’t notice, we don’t try to change.
So that’s habituation. And as you say, we don’t necessarily predict habituation, and related to that is what’s known as impact bias, which I think was coined by Daniel Gilbert. And this is a sense that when we think about both positive and negative, let’s start with positive, we think about a positive event in our future, let’s say marriage, let’s say something, that’s something that we want. We want to get married. When we think about it, we say, oh, that’s really going to make me happy for a very long time. And in fact, studies show that marriage does induce happiness, but for the short term. And after that, you go back to baseline, right? And negative events too. You think about, oh, if I get divorced, I will feel so bad. And you will, but again, you kind of get used to it, you adapt. And it doesn’t have as much long-term effect as you think it would. And that’s known as impact bias. We think things will affect us more than they should, because we are not aware of or we’re underestimating the impact of habituation and our ability to adapt to the circumstances around us.
Annie: So you’re kind of, you’re getting used to bad things, but you’re also getting used to good things. Do you think that that bias overall makes us happier or less happy?
Tali: I think, okay, it’s a little bit of both. It’s hard to say which one is more because there are bad things that we get used to, which is great that we get used to it because we can’t change it. So a loss of a loved one, you know, you’re going to not feel as bad over time. There are bad things that happen to us all the time, and when they happen, we feel really miserable. But over time we bounce back, and that is good. Without it, we probably won’t be able to function. And again, we see that less in depression. Depression is related to habituating to negative events much slower. So you’re not bouncing back as fast and that’s a huge problem.
On the other hand, we also have a choice of the good stuff. So the joy of a new relationship, the joy of moving into a new house, even like the view outside the window, you get too used to it. So you’re not having as much joy from it, which also makes you want to kind of maybe change things and you have a feeling of need. So I don’t know if it’s more good or if it’s more bad. But I think the reason again, like you see it in different cultures, you’d see it in different habituation per se in different animal species.
Probably it’s adaptive. I think what’s adaptive is perhaps not necessarily, I mean it could be that emotional habituation is adaptive on balance because we need to get used to the negative stuff, but habituation in general as a phenomena to just stimulate, really unrelated to whether it’s good or bad, is adaptive because what it does, it keeps the neurons like, they are keeping their resources, right?
So, because around me, there’s a lot of things, there’s objects. All right. My brain is not responding anymore. It’s been there all the time. So, it’s keeping its resources so I’m ready to respond to the next thing that’s coming my way. The next thing that comes my way may kill me. So it’s kind of like a way to be very optimal about our like resources. So that’s why we have it. But again, it also enhances your motivation. You know, if you think about your first entry-level job, which you may have been really happy about and excited about, if you were as happy and excited about your entry-level job 10 years later, you wouldn’t be motivated to work, to get that promotion, to move forward.
So you would probably not have developed and, you know, as an individual and in a species, right? Our need to kind of like go further is partially because we habituate, otherwise we don’t just be happy with what we have, but also, like, devastated with what went wrong.
Annie: I think that the great theme throughout what, you know, this conversation has been, I think that we have a tendency when we’re thinking about cognitive bias just to think about that as error and error is bad, right? So we think this is bad, period, right? But I think that what you’re pointing out so eloquently is you, look, given that we are biased in this particular way, there’s probably good to that too, and we need to recognize what the good things are that the biases actually create for you and yeah, we can get to all sorts of cases where we would prefer somebody not to be biased but that doesn’t mean that in general there aren’t things that are adaptive about it, that in general there aren’t things that are motivating about some of these biases, like getting you to go for the next job because you want to have that feeling again. You know, getting you to really try hard and believe that you can do it because you’re a little bit overly optimistic. And I think we need to realize that the biases aren’t a hundred percent bad, that there are good things that are coming from them.
Tali: Yeah. Not, not at all. They’re often, they’re associated with a lot of good outcomes and they’re there for that reason. I think part of the problem is that, not all the problem, but part of the problem, is the word bias is associated in people’s mind with social bias and inequality and that kind of thing, which obviously is not good. But what we’re talking about is systematic errors in judgment, which can lead to mistakes.
It can lead to negative outcomes, but they’re there because they also have some positive outcomes to them. So what we need to do is to try to find a way where we can embrace that bias to get all the good out of it. But also think about what are the negative outcomes and then use some other tricks to overcome those.
Annie: I love that. For listeners who are really interested in improving their decision-making, what’s a book or a TED talk they could watch or something that they could go to improve their decision-making?
Tali: I do really like Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. It’s an old book now. It’s one of my favorites. It’s just written so well. A lot of the things that he talks of are not necessarily intuitive to people who are not in the field. So it’s such an enjoyable read. I’m sure it will help you in some ways to identify your own biases and make your decisions better.
Annie: Completely agree. And actually, weirdly enough, two nights ago at dinner I was discussing it with the people I was having dinner with. Great book. The Alliance for Decision Education. We host this podcast. We’re trying to bring, you know, the principles of decision science and Decision Education that we, you know, are, you so well studied in adults and bring that into K through 12 education.
Question for you, imagine that we’re successful in our mission to start getting kids some of these principles of decision science and help them understand their own decision-making and give them tools to start to make better decisions. What impact do you think that would have on society?
Tali: So first of all, I think it’s a great idea. I think children find this really fascinating, just like how the brain works, like how people behave and why they really find it interesting. So I think it’s a great idea and having them aware of, like, what impacts different decisions can have, how can they can make them better. I think it’s a great idea, especially now is like the internet and social media, you know, knowledge is power. It’s so true. And by having the kids have knowledge, they can then figure out what’s, like, good for them. So how would that impact society? I mean.
Annie: There’s a little tiny question I’m asking.
Tali: Yeah, I mean, education is just, any kind of education, but obviously knowing yourself, knowing behavior, I mean, yeah, would lead to you know, maybe, like, choosing, maybe behavior that’s better, but also, like, a bit of nudging each other. I can see with my kids that their knowledge changes the way they interact with each other in order to, like, solve conflicts, or, like, even, like, when they want to nudge the other person toward their side, right? So it could also have a positive impact in that kind of way.
Annie: Thank you. Well, we hope so. We hope so. Thank you. By the way, that was such a great answer about really explaining, like, what would you be teaching kids. So I really appreciate that, and I may steal that from you. If listeners want to learn more about your work, follow you on social media, where should they start?
Tali: Sure, so there’s the free book. So, the latest one is Look Again with Cass Sunstein. And there are talks online, TED Talks as well as others. But a lot of the information is on my lab website. So, Affective Brain with an a, affective brain. We’ll have both like the talks for the public and some of the essays for public, but also it has like the academic papers if people are interested in that. I am averse to social media, so, but my lab has an account and I kind of like maybe sometimes like post a few articles, so it is on Twitter, AffectiveBrain with an A so that’s another place.
Annie: All right, fantastic. Well, we’ll be linking all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us. Your work is just so incredibly fascinating. You’re such an excellent communicator in terms of, you know, I just really recommend that people go listen to your TED Talks because you’re dealing, you know, particularly on the neuroscience side, you’re dealing with very complex topics, and I think that you’re such a good translator in order to help people who aren’t on the inside of the science really understand these concepts and put them to use in their own lives, which I think is a very special skill.
So thank you so much for the scientific work you do. Thank you so much for being such a great communicator about the science. Obviously, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Tali: Well, thank you so much for having me. This really was fun and a pleasure. It’s nice to go deep and to go into the details and you don’t always get to do that. So great. Thank you so much.