
In this short, Jonathan Schooler tells us about a discovery that launched his career and led to a puzzle that has haunted him ever since.
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Jad Abumrad
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Science Contributor/Guest
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Jad Abumrad
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Robert Krulwich
I'm Robert Krulwich.
Jad Abumrad
This is Radiolab, the podcast. And this week on the podcast, we did a collaborative thing with our friends at on the Media, a wonderful show produced here at wnyc.
Robert Krulwich
We decided to give them a headache. It was a very provocative idea brought to us by Joan o', Learer, one of our regular contributors. And we just couldn't get it out of our heads. It was such spooky. Yes.
Jad Abumrad
Begins with the work of a psychology professor, Jonathan Schooler, who many years ago, to great acclaim, got a bunch of people in a room together and he had them watch a video.
Science Contributor/Guest
They basically watch this bank robber walk into a bank and he hands a note to the clerk and he says, don't press the alarm and you won't get Hurt clerk then hands him some money and he exits.
Jad Abumrad
And these people watching the video, do they get a good look at the guy?
Science Contributor/Guest
You get a straight on look at the bank robber? Absolutely.
Jad Abumrad
And here was the test. After everybody watched this thing, he had half the subjects, only half, write down.
Science Contributor/Guest
In as much detail for five minutes everything they could remember about the appearance of the bank robber.
Jad Abumrad
So they'd write, you know, curly brown hair, mustache, thick glasses, whatever it was. Yeah, they just described the guy that they just seen. Now, only half of them did this, the other half did nothing. And then later, he had all the subjects look at a police lineup and try and identify the robber.
Robert Krulwich
Pick the bank robber. See if you can pick them.
Jad Abumrad
Yeah. Now, you would think that the people who had to describe the guy right after seeing him the first time, they would do really well at this, you know, because they had kind of set the memory. Yeah, that's not what they found.
Science Contributor/Guest
We found those people who had been asked to describe the face in great detail, they were actually less good at recognizing the face than if they didn't engage in any description at all.
Jad Abumrad
Not just a little less good. They were like 30 or 40% less good.
Science Contributor/Guest
So it was pretty whopping and just odd.
Jad Abumrad
Yeah. Even more odd is that as he did more studies, he found it wasn't just a face thing. It happens when you try to remember all kinds of stuff.
Science Contributor/Guest
We found the effect with colors. We found it later on with tastes choices.
Jad Abumrad
The effect was so strong and in so many different places that he gave it a name.
Narrator/Advertiser
Verbal.
Science Contributor/Guest
Overshadowing verbal.
Jad Abumrad
The words overshadow the truth.
Science Contributor/Guest
Yeah.
Robert Krulwich
So there's some association here. When you talk about it, you get it wrong.
Science Contributor/Guest
Exactly. So.
Jad Abumrad
And we should say these studies made Schooler into kind of a rock star.
Science Contributor/Guest
Yeah, it did get. It got some press at the time.
Jad Abumrad
And he appeared everywhere, really, including on a little show called Radiolab.
Robert Krulwich
He was even here.
Jad Abumrad
And this is where our story really begins. Because just as people like us were getting very excited about his work, the.
Robert Krulwich
Data began to go a little funny on him.
Science Contributor/Guest
That's right.
Jad Abumrad
And it all began when he tried to replicate that original experiment.
Science Contributor/Guest
Yes.
Robert Krulwich
As you kept doing it, what happened?
Science Contributor/Guest
Well, over the years, over the next five or six years, when I attempted to do it again, I would get the effect, but not to the same degree that I did initially.
Narrator/Advertiser
And this is a little troubling for him.
Jad Abumrad
That's Joan Allaire, a science writer, one of our contributing editors. He turned us onto this story, and it went like this. He says the first Time Schooler tries to replicate that study, that effect falls by 30%. And so he tried it again and again.
Science Contributor/Guest
And as we kept trying to replicate this study, the effect size got smaller and smaller and smaller.
Robert Krulwich
Meaning that big difference between the people who wrote about the bank robber and got it wrong and people who didn't write about the bank robber and they got it right, that big difference began to decline.
Narrator/Advertiser
This slow downward trajectory, it did sort.
Science Contributor/Guest
Of gradually get smaller. It wasn't as if all of a sudden it disappeared.
Narrator/Advertiser
Now, it's still significant, it's still publishable, but it's not nearly as exciting as it was that first time.
Jad Abumrad
So as you can imagine, Jonathan Schoolers was sitting in his office and he was like, what is happening here? I mean, it was so good the first time, and then it started to fade.
Robert Krulwich
He's a very good experimental psychologist. So he's not sloppy or anything.
Jad Abumrad
No. So he's thinking, what's happening here? And the first theory he has to.
Science Contributor/Guest
Really wrestle with is something known as regression to the mean.
Jad Abumrad
I mean, those are three of the most uninspired words put together.
Robert Krulwich
There are four words, though. It's regression two, the meme.
Jad Abumrad
But, Jonah, can you make it concrete for us?
Narrator/Advertiser
Sure. So you flip a coin, right? Let's say you'll flip a coin 10 times. You may get eight heads and two tails, and you may say, oh, my gosh, I've discovered a new law of coin flipping. When I flip coins in this room, they are almost always heads. But if you kept on flipping that coin for, say, a thousand times, your data would show almost certainly. Unless you really had discovered something very peculiar about that room, the results would get closer to the true result, which is about 50%.
Jad Abumrad
The results would regress to the mean. Sorry. Any case, his first thought was, maybe that's what's going on here.
Science Contributor/Guest
Yeah. Meaning when we first did the study, for whatever reason we got lucky, or.
Jad Abumrad
Unlucky as the case may be, you saw an outlier.
Science Contributor/Guest
Exactly.
Narrator/Advertiser
And reality is full of quirky surprises we can't explain. But over time, and this is the miracle of the scientific process, you regress to the true effect size.
Science Contributor/Guest
But one thing about the regression to the mean account is it doesn't really explain why the effects gradually get smaller. Regression to the mean, you predict one big effect and then it should basically totter around the actual value. This gradual decline doesn't naturally fall out of the regression to the mean account.
Jad Abumrad
Yeah, I mean, the effect could just go away, in which case you knew you were wrong. But why would it slowly get worse?
Science Contributor/Guest
Well, one possible explanation is that there was some aspect to the procedure that was important that we never really realized was important, and somehow we were gradually not including whatever that secret ingredient was.
Jad Abumrad
Meaning, you know, as a scientist, when you try and do an experiment, you try and do it the same way every time, down to the. To the floss that you floss your teeth with before you did the experiment.
Robert Krulwich
But there are too many things that you may not pay attention to.
Jad Abumrad
Yeah, there might be some little thing off to the side that you're not even thinking about.
Narrator/Advertiser
The color of the room in which he was conducting the experiments. It could have been how charming his grad student was who was actually asking the students to describe the bank robber. Totally making up a story here. Let's say that grad student was so charming, so good looking, so charismatic that he distracted the students. Then that grad student goes off, leaves the lab. Now he's got a much less exciting grad student. It's not nearly as distracting. And now the effect size of verbal overshadowing has gone down.
Robert Krulwich
The only problem with that is that that little sound that Jed and I made means that you have to have your charming grad student at the beginning and your less charming grad student in the middle and your even less charming grad student on your back.
Jad Abumrad
Yeah, they have to get slowly less charming.
Science Contributor/Guest
That's right.
Jad Abumrad
And so if you're thinking something is changing here, what is it? What is it? What is it? Did you go on some kind of mad search to figure out what you might be doing differently?
Science Contributor/Guest
We tried lots, a lot of different things, and in the end, I just moved to another area of research you got out of.
Jad Abumrad
And apparently one of Schooler's colleagues told.
Narrator/Advertiser
Him, don't worry about it. The only mistake you made was trying to replicate it in the first place.
Robert Krulwich
Really?
Narrator/Advertiser
Yeah.
Jad Abumrad
But here's the problem.
Science Contributor/Guest
Turns out it's not just me who has experienced this peculiar decline effect.
Jad Abumrad
As he started to look around, he realized what was happening to him was happening all over the place.
Robert Krulwich
Other scientists in all kinds of other sciences were having the exact same problem.
Science Contributor/Guest
In biology, there was a meta analysis of many different biological findings, showing there.
Jad Abumrad
Are a ton of examples, he says, and here's one. In the 90s, there were a bunch of studies about animals using symmetry to find mates, like birds, females, female birds, choosing their sexual partners based on how even the male's tail feathers were.
Narrator/Advertiser
It was a very exciting idea. And the first year there were eight tests of it, and all Eight found that. Yep. Fluctuating asymmetry, that's what the phenomenon is called, is real. We also got an effect size.
Jad Abumrad
So it seemed true.
Narrator/Advertiser
Yeah. That all over the world and all these different species, females had evolved this unconscious tendency to prefer symmetrical males. The next year it's tested 12 times and nine of the 12 confirm it. And then things start to fall apart. You can make the sound effect. Yeah, exactly. Until by the end of the 90s, you're going one for 13.
Jad Abumrad
One for 13.
Narrator/Advertiser
One. One for 13.
Robert Krulwich
Now, of course, these studies are not black and white. Yes. No studies. There's some gradation. But this was the basic trend that Jonah saw.
Jad Abumrad
And just in case birds seem a distant, here's another example, and I think.
Narrator/Advertiser
This is for me the most troubling area of the decline effect. Because you see, like second generation antipsychotics.
Robert Krulwich
Second generation antipsychotics.
Narrator/Advertiser
These are drugs used to treat people with schizophrenia, bipolar. When they first came out in the late 80s, early 90s, some studies found that they were about twice as effective than first generation antipsychotics. And then what happened is the standard story of the decline effect. Cue the sound effect, which is clinical trial after clinical trial. The effect size just slowly started to fall apart.
Jad Abumrad
And that's not all.
Narrator/Advertiser
You see a similar decline with things like Prozac and antidepressants. The effect of the drugs have gotten weaker, but the placebo effect has also gotten stronger. I was talking to one guy at a drug company who, he was kind of interesting. He blamed that on drug advertising. He said that they started to see their placebo effect go up in the late 90s when these drug companies started advertising.
Jad Abumrad
But then wouldn't that actually offer an explanation for this decline thing? Because, you know, some. If you know about what this drug is supposed to do, maybe it works differently somehow.
Science Contributor/Guest
Certainly there are areas of psychology where that can change the outcome in one way or another. But it's very unlikely that, you know, in say, these female preferences for symmetrical feathers that the, you know, the birds got wind of this symmetry finding and now all of a sudden are not. Not into it anymore.
Jad Abumrad
I don't know.
Robert Krulwich
You haven't been around chickadee conversation.
Jad Abumrad
Word passes quickly amongst the chickadees.
Robert Krulwich
And so does that mean that you. Can you explain why what you found at the beginning is not what you.
Jad Abumrad
Find now and why it gradually went away? Gradually is still puzzling?
Science Contributor/Guest
I tell you, I find it very puzzling too. I'm personally baffled.
Narrator/Advertiser
It's tough to come up with an all purpose Explanation or some easy fix.
Jad Abumrad
It could be a lot of different things bundled together into one phenomenon. He says, you know, maybe in some cases it really is statistics.
Science Contributor/Guest
Progression to the almost sure to be a part of it.
Jad Abumrad
Or maybe in some cases it's, you.
Science Contributor/Guest
Know, this gradual change in the procedure in something that we just don't know what it was that happened.
Jad Abumrad
Can't rule it out.
Science Contributor/Guest
But I would probably be less shocked than most people if something unconventional was actually involved in this as well.
Robert Krulwich
Unconventional? Like.
Science Contributor/Guest
Like I. I say this with some trepidation, but I think we can't rule out the possibility that there could be some way in which the act of observation is actually changing the nature of reality. That somehow in the process of observing effects, we change the nature of those effects.
Robert Krulwich
You're in real trouble.
Jad Abumrad
Essentially, what he's saying, we think, is that when he discovered that thing with the bank robber experiment, that maybe the discovery itself somehow set in motion a series of events that made the thing he discovered start to sort of run away.
Science Contributor/Guest
Well, I'm not going to say that. I'm certainly not going to say that there's some sort of intentionality to these effects disappearing more that it's almost. And again, this is just speculation, some sort of habituation. So just as when you put your hand on your leg, you feel it, and then as you leave it there, it becomes less and less noticeable somehow, there may be some kind of habituation that happens with respect to these findings.
Jad Abumrad
What is the hand and what is the leg in this?
Science Contributor/Guest
Well, in this most radical conjecture, there could be some sort of collective consciousness that's habituating. Again, radical speculation. Keep in mind the notion that the laws of reality are unchangeable is an assumption. It's a reasonable assumption, but we don't know it for a fact. And there have been physicists who have even speculated that perhaps the rules change as time goes on.
Jad Abumrad
The problem with this idea is if you really believe it, then you can never really know anything.
Robert Krulwich
We're sliding into that kind of territory. Like, you know, by this logic, you could never really know for sure because reality could change based upon the observer's position, habits, biases, information, whatever.
Science Contributor/Guest
Well, so far we have not really seen these types of things in the domain of physics, but an aspirin might not do what it used to. There's a question that you haven't asked, which is, let's say that we were to do a study and demonstrate this decline effect. That when you keep running experiments, that they get smaller. Well, what happens when you Try to replicate that effect. Does the decline effect decline?
Jad Abumrad
Yeah, that's a good question.
Science Contributor/Guest
Maybe we could just get rid of the decline effect by studying it.
Jad Abumrad
But then if you were to study the decline of the decline effect, then it would undecline and it would come back. Do you see what I'm saying?
Robert Krulwich
I see what you're saying. You're just stuck forever in the great seesaw of the universe.
Jad Abumrad
We should thank our friends at OnTheMedia. On the media is a show that analyzes the media, as I'm sure you know. And it's an amazing show. I mean, it's an amazing show. Brooke and Bob, who host the show are, are funny, hysterically funny and brilliantly smart. And it's the kind of show that it's just kind of essential. It's one of those shows. I could not recommend it more on themedia.org all one word onthemedia.org check it out.
Robert Krulwich
They're going to do an entire hour on the subject of data and we have sort of snuck this issue that we've just talked about into the middle of that show. So it's the same thing, but in a very different context. You can go to their podcast on Friday 13th May and there it and.
Jad Abumrad
We shall be until it and we decline.
Robert Krulwich
Yep.
Jad Abumrad
Into oblivion. I'm Jad Abumran.
Robert Krulwich
I was and will continue to be.
Jad Abumrad
I hope, for the moment. Robert Bye.
Robert Krulwich
Hi, this is Colin von Heering. I'm a Radiolab listener from Portland, Oregon. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.
Science Contributor/Guest
End of message.
Jad Abumrad
Radiolab is supported by the National Forest Foundation, a non profit transforming America's love of nature into action for our forests. Did you know that national forests provide clean drinking water to 1 in 3Americans? And when forests struggle, so do we. The National Forest foundation creates lasting impact by restoring forests and watersheds, strengthening wildfire resilience and expanding recreation access for all. Last year they planted 5.3 million trees and led over 300 projects to protect nature and communities nationwide. Learn more at nationalforests.org Radiolab for delicious.
Narrator/Advertiser
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Radiolab’s episode “Cosmic Habituation” explores a baffling scientific mystery: why do certain scientific results seem to diminish or even vanish with repeated experimentation? Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the episode unpacks the so-called “decline effect”—a phenomenon where early scientific findings become less reliable or pronounced over time. Through investigative storytelling and an engaging conversation with psychology professor Jonathan Schooler, the hosts delve into the scientific, psychological, and philosophical implications of these fading effects.
"We found those people who had been asked to describe the face in great detail, they were actually less good at recognizing the face than if they didn't engage in any description at all."
— [03:28, Science Contributor/Guest]
Surprising Result: Describing what they saw reduced accurate recognition—by 30-40%.
Naming the Effect: Schooler coined this the "verbal overshadowing" effect because "the words overshadow the truth." ([04:06, Jad Abumrad])
Replication Attempts: Schooler noticed the effect diminished over time.
Statistical Questioning: Schooler and the hosts discuss “regression to the mean”—the tendency for extreme findings to moderate with more data ([06:38, Narrator/Advertiser]).
Possible Causes Considered:
Not Isolated: Schooler discovers his experience is widespread.
Example—Biology:
Example—Medicine:
"I say this with some trepidation, but I think we can't rule out the possibility that there could be some way in which the act of observation is actually changing the nature of reality."
— [13:03, Science Contributor/Guest]
Disquieting Implications
Meta-Decline?
Cosmic Habituation is a classic Radiolab exploration at the boundary of science and philosophy. What begins as a psychological curiosity—why describing a memory makes you worse at remembering—spirals into a provocative meditation on the nature of scientific knowledge, the quirks of statistics, and the possibility that the act of observation may alter reality itself. While the explanations remain elusive, the episode captures the profound mystery and beauty at the heart of scientific inquiry.
For deeper dives and additional context, listeners are pointed to On the Media’s special episode on data, recorded in collaboration with Radiolab.