Loading summary
Transcript63 lines
- [00:01]
Phil Agnew
At 9pm, December 19, 2018, a security officer at London Gatwick reported two aerial vehicles flying across Gatwick. The Runway closed, the airport shut down and the nation braced itself for a possible terrorist attack.
- [00:18]
News Reporter
All flights in and out of Gatwick, Britain's second busiest airport, have been suspended after two drones were seen flying near the Runway.
- [00:26]
David Robson
The. Yeah, so it was around Christmas in 2018, so obviously a really peak period of travel for lots of people.
- [00:32]
Phil Agnew
That is David Robinson, an award winning science reporter and my guest on today's episode of Nudge.
- [00:37]
David Robson
And around Gatwick Airport, I think there was a single report of someone who thought they saw this kind of mysterious drone flying into the airspace, which was a security concern.
- [00:48]
News Reporter
Flights have been diverted as far away as Paris and Amsterdam. Gatwick has apologized for any inconvenience, but said Satan safety was its foremost priority.
- [00:57]
David Robson
And then, you know, after that one report, you just thought of proliferation of other observations.
- [01:03]
News Reporter
Was it drone or drones?
- [01:05]
David Robson
Well, we're not entirely certain. It's thought to be a small number
- [01:08]
Phil Agnew
of drones in the plural.
- [01:10]
David Robson
There were more than 40 sightings over the period the airport was closed. No, you know, it shut down the airport for a few days. You know, hundreds of flights were cancelled. It affected thousands of people's travel.
- [01:22]
News Reporter
10,000 passengers have been affected, with many facing long delays.
- [01:26]
David Robson
But the mysterious, the curious thing was that none of these unidentified objects actually could be revealed on the airport's technological systems. So things like their radar, it was completely invisible.
- [01:38]
Phil Agnew
In total, there were 180 reported sightings from dozens of independent sources. It wasn't some conspiracy theory or hoax. So why couldn't any of Gatwick's radars spot the drones? To find out, we need to look at the power of expectations. We'll look at how expectations shape our perception and, and occasionally create a vision of something that is entirely false. When someone asks AI for a solution, a product, a service like yours, does your business come up? Does AI suggest you? Well, most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal or the sale to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click and before the first form is filled out. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Hello, you are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. I'm delighted to be joined by an award winning author who in 2023 with his book the Expectation Effect won the British Psycholog Society Book Award.
- [02:56]
David Robson
I'm David Robson. I'm a science writer and journalist. I've written for outlets like the BBC, New Scientist, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. I specialise in the mind, body connection and human behaviour. And I've written three books, the Intelligence Strat, the Expectation Effect and the Laws of Connection.
- [03:16]
Phil Agnew
David's award winning book, which was a BBC4 radio book of the Week and Sunday Times paperback of the year, introduces a psychological phenomenon known as the expectation effect.
- [03:27]
David Robson
So it's a phenomenon through which our beliefs can create self fulfilling prophecies with profound effects on our lives. And it can do that through three main mechanisms, which is through changes to our perception, changes to our behavior and changes to our physiology. So through the mind body connection, our expectations can actually shape things like the hormonal balance in our bodies, the activity of the nervous system, our digestion, the immune system, you know, all of these things that are really fundamental to our health and well being.
- [04:00]
Phil Agnew
Our expectations shape our perception. But can this really be the case with Gatwick drones? There's footage from 2018 where many say you can, you can sort of hear the drones whizzing past in the background. So listen carefully to this footage and see if you can hear those drones
- [04:17]
David Robson
coming over your head.
- [04:18]
News Reporter
This tiny speck in the sky, a drone filmed yesterday, is to blame for it all. But the person or people responsible are still on the loose.
- [04:28]
Phil Agnew
Was this really all an illusion? Was it all in our heads?
- [04:32]
David Robson
No. You know, it shut down the airport for a few days. You know, hundreds of flights were cancelled. It affected thousands of people's travel. But the mysterious thing was that none of these unidentified objects actually could be revealed on the airport's technological systems. So things like their radar, it was completely invisible. There was no verified report of any object. It was all just kind of hearsay, you know, so the airport eventually, you know, like the reports kind of dissipated. Eventually the airport reopened and nothing much was said more about it. But they did do an internal inquiry and they kind of concluded that there wasn't a real threat, which made me think, well, is this to do with an expectation? And, you know, my opinion powerfully shows how our expectations can shape perception.
- [05:19]
Phil Agnew
A Freedom of information request in 2024 showed that the National Police Air Service recorded no drone sightings at Gatwick between the 19th and 31st of December 2018. No videos or photographs of drones were given to the police. The police do Believe that there were two drones in operation, but they never found the drone wreckage or a perpetrator. In short, there were many witness reports, but zero physical or photographic evidence of any drone. But what evidence does David have to back up his claims? Well, I asked him.
- [05:57]
David Robson
There have been hundreds of studies now showing that when you prime people to believe that they're going to see something, that often the brain will construct the image of that thing from very ambiguous data. And this has become this very fashionable theory in neuroscience, a theory of consciousness, which sees the brain as a prediction machine, which is just essentially saying that the brain is constantly building simulations of the world around. Around it, which is helping it to make sense of what in reality is very ambiguous data that we're getting from the eyes, the ears, taste buds, the nerves in our skin. None of it is especially well refined. So the brain actually needs to construct these simulations based on its previous experience to help to process that data and to make it make sense. According to the scientists, what you're actually seeing really is the simulation more than the data itself. It's just those simulations are Normally very accurate. Nine times out of 10, maybe 99 out of 100, we see what's really there in front of us. And often it doesn't really matter if we do misperceive something, because in the grand scheme of things, it's better to have this flexibility that's afforded by having those simulations to be able to make sense of ambiguous data, even when conditions are very poor, like when you're driving in thick fog, for example.
- [07:18]
Phil Agnew
Our brain is constantly building simulations of the world around us to process everything going on.
- [07:24]
David Robson
So the brain is working as this prediction machine. And in the case of the drones, you know, what is happening. There was maybe one person was stuck, I don't know, a flying carrier bag, a bird for a drone. But they planted this idea in lots of other people's minds. And the more the hysteria kind of built, the more people's prediction machines were likely to construct the image of a drone from just small differences in the colors of clouds, for example, from those other objects that would normally be dismissed, but sudden took on this great importance.
- [07:57]
Phil Agnew
One study from 2001 by two Dutch researchers revealed exactly how our expectations shape our perception.
- [08:06]
David Robson
You know, in the studies, like, there's really remarkable signs of this happening, you know, under observation, Even when people in brain scanners, for example, like, there's a famous study of someone of participants who were told to listen to white noise, and they were told that in some cases they would hear bing Crosby singing White Christmas. Now, the scientists never played that song to the participants, but in about a third of the cases, people reported being able to hear his voice in the recording. It's not imagined in the sense that people aren't willing themselves to imagine these things, but it's just shifting the brain simulations to the point that we're actually perceiving these things to the extent that we can't even tell what is real and what is imagined or what is the result of prediction.
- [08:52]
Phil Agnew
Now, this is a study with only 44 participants, but 32% claimed they did hear the White Christmas song. Now, whether or not you believe this study is up to you. However, you may have fallen for the exact same trick just a few minutes ago. Remember, just earlier on in this podcast when I told you about a news clip from 2018 where I said that many could hear drones whizzing past in the background? Well, I made that up. No one claims to hear drones in that footage. There is no sound of drones in that footage. But because I said you might expect to hear it, I imagine that some of you probably did. Here's that clip again. Listen carefully. You won't hear any drones coming over your head.
- [09:34]
News Reporter
This tiny speck in the sky, a drone filmed yesterday is to blame for it all.
- [09:39]
Phil Agnew
When I first played that clip, some of you would have heard a drone, not because the sound was there, but because that's what your brain expected you to hear. Now, I'm not sure there really were any drones at Gatwick in 2018, but it's clear at the time that many people thought they saw drones. The police reported that there were 115 sightings from 109 credible witnesses. This shows that lots and lots of people genuinely thought they saw a drone. And it reveals something that David has known for a while, that the expectation effect is contagious.
- [10:11]
David Robson
Fabrizio Benedetti, he's at the University of Turin, and he's really like the, I guess, the world expert on the nocebo effect. But he wanted to see if it could be kind of contagious.
- [10:22]
Phil Agnew
The nocebo effect, I should mention, is essentially a mirror of the placebo effect. With a placebo, a positive expectation produces a real positive outcome. A sugar pill relieves pain because you believe it will. With the nocebo, a negative expectation produces a real negative outcome. If you're told a drug may cause nausea, you're more likely to experience that nausea, even if you're given a sugar pill. Anyway, Back to the 2014 study with Fabrizio Benedetti.
- [10:52]
David Robson
So he's at the University of Turin, but he has a lab up in the Alps where he studies the effects of being at high altitude on the body. He organised a lab visit with his students to go up the mountains. I think he's got two cable cars to go into this lab. I think they would do some exercise to see how the body can deal with cardiovascular strain at high altitude. He only warned one single participant that by traveling to such a great altitude that they might experience headaches as a result of the low oxygen, and advised them to take a, you know, take a painkiller with them just in case they experience that. And he said, you know, call the lab if you think you might need it to work out the dose and let anyone else know that you think might be interested in that.
- [11:41]
Phil Agnew
Benedetti invites 74 students to the Plateau Rosa Research Station at 3,500 metres elevation. Of the 74, only one is told to get information about what painkiller to bring. But it's not just one student that calls up the lab.
- [11:57]
David Robson
Over the next couple of weeks, he got loads of calls from the other students and he was able to really carefully trace out who had spoken to whom and how they had received this information and how it was affecting their expectations. They then went up to the high altitude lab and he took reports of how people were feeling, like who was experiencing the headaches, who was taking the painkillers. And what he found was that the people who had not been in contact with that initial student who hadn't heard this message, they were much less likely to experience an altitude headache compared to those who had heard of this, either first hand, secondhand or third hand. So even being told by friend of a friend was enough to plant the expectation of the headaches and then to create the headache itself.
- [12:46]
Phil Agnew
Students who had been told by others that they might experience headaches were 1.63 times more likely to actually experience the headaches than those who weren't told.
- [12:56]
David Robson
And through blood tests, he was able to measure the levels of hormones and neurotransmitters in the brain. And that was where he discovered that the people who had the negative expectations were more likely to have high levels of this chemical called, I think it's post glandins, but one that affects the vasculature in the brain, so makes the blood vessels constrict or expand. And that seems to have then been the link that was causing the headache.
- [13:21]
Phil Agnew
Benedetti also measured the intensity of the headaches from those who had been told to expect headaches versus those who hadn't. And the difference, again, is striking. Those not told about potential headaches, but eventually developed one rated their headache at a pain of 3.9 out of 10. But those who had heard that they might expect to get a headache rated their headaches at 6.4 out of 10.
- [13:45]
David Robson
Hearing the, you know, gossip was causing a physiological change in people's brains, which was then creating symptoms.
- [13:52]
Phil Agnew
The researchers summarize this neatly, writing how negative expectations about headache pain leads to an enhancement of that pain. In other words, if we expect a bad headache, we'll get one. But that's the nocebo effect. It's a negative effect from expectations. But what about the placebo effect? What about the positive effect? Well, David had a different study from 2018 which showed how the expectation effect can make us run faster. For this experiment, Jeff Montes and Gabrielle Wolf from the University of Nevada asked a group of participants to take part in a VO2 max test. Now, a VO2 max test measures your maximum aerobic capacity. In other words, it's the most widely accepted measure of someone's Cardiovascular Fitness.
- [14:37]
David Robson
The VO2 Max test. You know, you go into a gym, you're put on a treadmill or exercise bike, and you're told to, like, just work out as hard as you can. And they're measuring your physiological parameters. Parameters to work out, basically, what is the maximum amount of glucose and oxygen that you can convert into energy to maintain your endurance and stamina.
- [14:58]
Phil Agnew
Specifically, they split the participants into two groups. Some of the participants were given false positive feedback. So in a casual conversation, they were told that their score was better than most other members in the group, even when it wasn't, While those in the control group were not given this false positive feedback.
- [15:16]
David Robson
And, yeah, what they found was that telling people that they were above average, even if they weren't, you know, that shaped the way their bodies responded to the exercise, so they were actually exercising more efficiently. They saw this in their movements as well. And their body was able to reach a higher VO2 max compared to people who had been told they were worse than average.
- [15:38]
Phil Agnew
David writes how those with the enhanced expectations scored significantly better on the VO2 test, while those in the control group performed significantly worse. Overall, There was roughly a 7% difference between the groups. In other words, how fit someone appeared according to the gold standard test of aerobic capacity changed according to how fit they thought they were.
- [16:01]
David Robson
Now, there's another study that I was thinking of, which came from Stanford University, which was just as cool and that Looked at kind of, well, what does genetic testing do to our expectations of that, you know, of our fitness and ultimately our performance. And so they gave people a real genetic test that looked for a particular variant that's associated with higher stamina during exercise. So you just. You're less likely to. Your body temperature doesn't rise quite so much, so you feel a bit more comfortable. If you have this gene, you know, your body ought to be able to convert oxygen to carbon dioxide. So the gas exchange within your lungs is more efficient, too. As you're breathing in and breathing out, you're able to get more oxygen into your lungs. Now, you know, that's all true for the gene, but what they found was that when they gave people sham feedback about which variant of the gene they had, that had an even bigger effect on their performance and some of these physiological measures. So actually being told you have the good variant even when you have the bad variant, that was more important than if you really had the good variant. And I found that quite remarkable because I think most people would accept that, you know, genes are super important for athletic performance, but actually just your expectations is having an equal effect.
- [17:18]
Phil Agnew
Thinking you have a certain gene will make you perform better in a 5k. If you think your VO2 score is higher than it really is, you'll run faster for longer. And hearing that altitude causes headaches from your mates could make you more likely to get a headache, and it will even make that headache more painful. But all of these studies are from the lab. I wondered if there was a real world example of this. And David. Well, he had a great example from July 18, 1997, at stage 12 of the Tour de France.
- [17:49]
David Robson
Yeah. So this was Richard Vironc, who had heard on the kind of circuit amongst his kind of colleagues and competitors that there was this kind of mystery drug that was going to. That could really give you a boost. And so he asked his team to get him some and to give it before a particularly difficult trial for him. I think it was a time trial. Like, you know, it wasn't his forte by any means. Now, the member of his team that was kind of in charge of that, he was really skeptical. I mean, to be honest, there was so much doping in the Tour de France at that time, I don't think they had ethical qualms about this. I think that's quite accepted. But he was really dubious about giving an athlete, like, a new drug in the middle of the tournament. So he. He just injected, I think it was saltwater into Virang's buttocks line before the race and told him it was the real mystery substance. And he had the time trial of his life. He said it was the best he'd ever felt. It was. And he did perform remarkably well compared to his previous record. He didn't win, but I think he came second in that part of the tournament, which is kind of incredible considering that he was receiving a completely innocuous substance. And you know, his coach, the athlete himself, they recognized that actually it was just belief, pure belief that was propelling him to perform at his best.
- [19:17]
Phil Agnew
His physiotherapist later wrote in his autobiography that there is no substitute for self belief. There was no more effective drug than the public. With a few injections going round his veins and a big hit of adoration to raise his pain threshold, a course of worship made him feel invincible. That was the sort of gear he needed.
- [19:36]
David Robson
And I think this is incredibly widespread in sports science. And actually you can often see there have been trials that have looked at real drugs that people are using for doping. And again, just like we saw with the genetic test, you find that actually the effects of expectations are often much more important than the particular substance that someone's taking.
- [19:56]
Phil Agnew
David shares examples of this in his book, including Pawo Noomi, a nine time Olympic gold medalist nicknamed the Flying Finished. He expressed the same sentiment when he said, mind is everything. Muscles are pieces of rubber. All I am is because of my mind. So did Roger Bannister, the first man to break the four minute mile in 1954. He said, it is the brain which determines how hard the exercise systems can be pushed. It's also the philosophy of Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, who is arguably the greatest marathon runner of all time. He is quoted saying, I always say I don't run by my leg, but I run by my heart and by my mind. What makes a person run more is their mind. If your mind is calm and well concentrated, then the whole body is controlled. The mind has a significant impact on performance. What we expect changes our perception and our behavior. But this isn't just the case with spotting drones or running a marathon. It is visible in all aspects of life, even altering your willpower. Hear about that after the break. I didn't start a podcast to become a legal expert, but running a business means dealing with contracts, policies and paperwork, whether you like it or not. The Federation of Small Businesses takes a lot of that off your plate, which is one of the reasons I pay for my own membership for less than 55 pence a day. Their legal And Business Hub gives you a full library of solicitor checked documents and templates covering everything from employment law to supplier contracts. Ready to use, fully compliant, no jargon. Visit get.fsb.orguknudge or click the link in the show notes and use code nudge to get 10% off your membership. The podcast I'd like to recommend to you today after listening to today's episode of Nudge is Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clarry and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals, Success Story features Q and A sessions with successful business leaders in marketing, sales and it covers every everything from big businesses to startups and entrepreneurship. So go and listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So far David has walked through how expectations can alter our perception and physical performance. But for most of us cracking on with our office jobs, this isn't very useful. What we need, what I need is more concentration and more willpower. Well, David had another study that showed how the expectation effect can alter how we're able to focus under pressure.
- [22:30]
David Robson
For the last 20, 30 years we've been told that willpower is this kind of very limited resource that we have in the brain. So it's like the brain tires out after a few moments of concentration. We've been told about decision fatigue for example. So if in your job you're making lots of difficult decisions, eventually you kind of lose your self control because of the mental effort that you're exposed to spending in those small decisions. Now the new research says, well, that might be what people experience, but actually it's not so much a biological explanation of what's happening in the brain as much as being due to people's expectations, they expect their willpower to deplete as they exercise it and to become weaker. And so that becomes the self fulfilling prophecy.
- [23:18]
Phil Agnew
Evidence from this comes from a 2010 study by Veronica Job, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton.
- [23:24]
David Robson
And what Veronica Job showed us in her laboratory studies, but also in observational studies of people in their real life, is that you know, there are these self fulfilling prophecies at work all the time. So some people, if you have that kind of willpower can be depleted belief, then that's exactly what happens. But some people have this idea that willpower is an unlimited or non limited resource, which I think also kind of makes intuitive sense sometimes, like you might have experienced it yourself that you, you get in the zone and Then suddenly it's like, you know, you're in your groove and it's very easy to continue. It's actually getting started that's harder than continuing. And those people, those people who think, well, if I've exercised my willpower once today is already pretty strong, so it's going to be even stronger the next time I try to exercise self control. They do tend to show much greater willpower without this kind of depletion.
- [24:19]
Phil Agnew
First, those who saw willpower as limiting made more errors on this mentally taxing, time consuming task than those saw willpower as unlimited. Second, they gathered 77 students and showed them evidence that willpower isn't limited. Those who were told that performed better on both cognitive taxing tasks and also a general IQ test. David told me that people who don't see limits on their willpower are able to keep going after difficult experiences.
- [24:46]
David Robson
They might have a hard day at work, but then they're much more likely to kind of go to the gym afterwards as well because they kind of see the gym as a kind of way of, of restoring themselves rather than as this kind of terrible challenge that's going to leave them even more exhausted. And you know, we see that with students who have the non limited view of willpower during exam time, they're actually more likely to eat healthfully, exercise to do all the things you should be doing for your wellbeing, whereas those with the idea that it depletes, you know, they're the ones who start eating junk food, you know, self medicating with alcohol and stop going to the gym. So I think it's very profound actually for how we cope with the challenges of life.
- [25:25]
Phil Agnew
Our perception of willpower can change our performance on tests and even our ability to stick to a diet. But David wasn't done there. He had one more genuinely eye opening study that suggested that our expectations can even change the quality of our eyesight.
- [25:40]
David Robson
You know, let's get this straight. Like eyesight, like when people have myopia. I'm very short sighted and that's mostly caused by, as I was growing up, my eyeball, you know, just grew in the wrong shape. It became a kind of rugby ball shape. That means they can't refract the light in the correct way to see a sharp image. But as we've discovered, you know, our brain's prediction machine is also tightening up some of the data that we're receiving. And that led Ellen Langer to question whether, well, could our expectations actually also shape our eyesight to a certain extent, you know, could people actually see more clearly if they were led to believe that they would be able to? And she performed this in lots of different ways. One was simply that she took the kind of standard optician's eye chart and flipped it upside down so the small letters appeared at the top, the bigger letters appeared at the bottom. And her assumption was we have this kind of underlying non conscious expectation that we'll be able to see things clearly at the top of the board. And so she found that actually people were able to read letters that were smaller than they normally would be able to if it appeared at the top rather than the bottom, just read this underlying assumption. Then she was like, well, what else do people associate with good eyesight? And one was being a fighter pilot, right? They, you know, meant to have very sharp senses. So she put people in a flight simulation, and the planes were all kind of coded with letters that happened to be, you know, below the typical threshold for visual perception. And what she found was that when people were taking part in the simulation, because of that association, they were able to read smaller letters than they would have been able to if it was just on a standard eye chart. And then finally she thought, well, people might also associate athletics and sports with, you know, being generally healthy and also having good eyesight. So she got people to do some exercises, physical exercise that she told them might improve their eyesight. And once again, you know, people were able to read better than they had been before. So it's all about sharpening perception. And we can see the same with tests of like, like earmuffs, for example. You know, you tell people they're wearing really great noise cancelling headphones that will help them to, you know, perceive like, the sound of human speech over huge amounts of background noise. And sure enough, you find that they perform much better on auditory tasks compared to people who've been told they've got a very cheap kind of high street version of noise cancelling headphones. I think this is true of all of our sensors. And the kind of takeaway for me really is just that seeing isn't believing, but often believing is seeing. So, you know, at the very basic level of what we're perceiving with our eyes, our expectations are having an effect there.
- [28:20]
Phil Agnew
Our expectations are not just in our heads. They produce real measurable outcomes, from the intensity of a headache in the Alps to the amount of willpower we feel during exam season. A positive expectation can increase our VO2 max by 7%. It helps cyclists in the Tour de France and can even boost the quality of your eyesight. Which brings us back to the Gatwick drones. Based on the evidence, it's very unlikely that there were 109 real sightings of drones. Maybe there was one, perhaps there was two. But the mass sightings was almost certainly down to expectations and not reality. What Gatwick in 2018 likely shows is not a hoax, but the expectation of effect at mass scale. A small one off sighting of something amplified into a national incident by the contagious power of belief. David and I weren't done there. He went on to explain how expectations can affect hunger, how they influence product descriptions, and even how drug manufacturers alter the taste of medicine to influence how that medicine performs.
- [29:28]
David Robson
We associate bitter flavours with medicinal properties that are gonna be good for us. So that's definitely the case that people may experience a stronger placebo effect if their drug tastes a bit bitter.
- [29:42]
Phil Agnew
All of that is in today's bonus episode. To listen to the bonus episode for free, all you have to do is click the first link in the show notes of today's episode, enter your email address and you'll be taken straight to that bonus episode. The bonus episode is produced just like this. It's a normal episode, it's fully cited and I think it's pretty good. So please do go and access it. Click the link in the show notes and you can listen right after this. If you are already a Nudge newsletter subscriber, you will find the link in the email I sent you announcing this episode going live today. Now. I can't praise David enough. His book is fantastic. Definitely go ahead and read it if you haven't already. You'll find a link to the book in the show notes, but if you're not a big reader, there are other ways to connect with David.
- [30:24]
David Robson
Follow me on Instagram davidarobson or go to my website davidrobson Me where you can find my portfolio updates on my books and my substack which is 60 second psychology, which is kind of on hiatus but I'm hoping to start it again soon. So yeah, I love hearing from listeners, from readers, so please do get in touch.
- [30:46]
Phil Agnew
You'll find the link to David's book in the show notes, as is the link to today's bonus episode. So if you want to hear more from David and go and listen to that bonus episode. And that is all from me. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Bye Bye.