Loading summary
Transcript102 lines
- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [00:03]
B
So when most people think of naked mole rats, their unusual relationship to cancer probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind.
- [00:10]
A
But maybe it should be. Because it is incredibly rare for them to develop cancer, which could be partly down to their unique immune system. Or it might be the way that their cells respond to damage.
- [00:23]
B
So scientists are studying their biology. Boy, its cancer fighting secrets. It's a reminder that discoveries can sometimes come from places you don't expect.
- [00:31]
A
Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research. Thousands of scientists of doctors and nurses work across more than 20 countries to help turn discoveries in the lab into new tests, new treatments and new innovations.
- [00:47]
B
And the impact is clear. Over the past 50 years, the charity's pioneering work has helped double cancer survival in the uk, meaning more people living longer, better lives free from the fear of cancer.
- [01:00]
A
For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research, their breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience this.
- [01:10]
B
Podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Car shopping shouldn't feel like preparing for a marathon of paperwork. That's why Carvana makes buying and financing your car easy. From start to finish. Search thousands of vehicles with great prices, all online, all on your time. And when you're ready, your new car shows up right at your door. It doesn't get better than that. Buy your car the easy way on. Delivery fees may apply.
- [01:41]
A
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [02:12]
B
Welcome to the Rest is Science. This is Field Notes, a kind of podcast expedition diary where Hannah and I share some of the thoughts we've been carrying around thrilling discoveries and big questions. Whatever's been occupying our I mean, some.
- [02:28]
A
People call it thoughts, other people call it burdens. But every week we're gonna do this.
- [02:33]
B
Week I call it all I've got.
- [02:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, that's fair. We're gonna bring something from our proverbial science mystery bag. We're gonna bring something to show each other. It's like a rest of science's very own version of show and tell. And yeah, this week it's your turn.
- [02:50]
B
Michael that's right. And so later in the episode, I am going to share a story, actually a story about the scariest moment for me ever in the minefield psychological experimentation show. I did. And it's not what you're expecting?
- [03:09]
A
Well, I mean, you were the man who locked himself away for three days and started hallucinating. So if it's scarier than that, then I think the rest of us need to buckle up. As ever, we would also like to hear your questions, your theories, your thought experiments, maybe not your burdens. You can send them in to us and we'll dust off a shelf for you. You can, you can join our. Our vast collection of curiosities.
- [03:31]
B
Yeah, we'd love to put you there. So let's begin with Francois, who sent in a question. It seems such a waste to spend energy adding heat to our houses in winter and spending more energy on AC to remove it in summer. Could we feasibly design a machine that pumps heat into a form of reverse fridge during summer, stores it, and then pumps the heat back into our homes in the winter?
- [03:52]
A
I mean, Francois, you have a mind that is a marvel, but unfortunately, you've invented something that already exists, because the machine you're describing is called a seasonal thermal energy storage system. And it's essentially. It's like a big battery, but for heat. The problem is if you try and store heat, it leaks quite a lot.
- [04:14]
B
Right.
- [04:14]
A
If you put a cup of tea in a thermos, come back the next morning, it's going to be cold. Right. He has this habit of sneaking away. But there are some places where they do this. So there's a particular neighborhood in Canada known as Drake Landing, where it gets really warm in the summer, but also extremely cold in the winter. I mean, like, that sort of part of the world has, like, massive variance in summer and winter temperature. And what they did there is they built 52 houses that were all connected to this massive underground storage field. So in the summer, what they do is they have all of these solar panels on their roof, and they use that to pump this solution basically down into this massive underground chamber where they have all of these boreholes. And they literally heat up the rock that sits down there to about 80 degrees centigrade. And then in the winter, when it's, like freezing cold up top, they reverse the process. They pump water through these, like, very warm rocks and use it all to heat up their houses up top. You know, the London Underground is basically a perfect demonstration of the way that the Earth itself can hold on to energy in the form of heat, I.
- [05:33]
B
Was going to say. That's impressive that the rock can hold the heat so well. This happens in the underground in London as well.
- [05:39]
A
Yeah. Because right in the early days when the underground was built, it was like 10, 15 degrees. And they're. The clay, the sort of London clay, it was actually quite cold down there. But after, you know, 150 years or so of all of these trains moving in and out of tunnels of people, of that energy being continually pushed in, it sort of saturated the heat capacity of the clay itself. The clay cannot take on any more heat effectively. So all of the heat just continues to be down there. It can be 40 degrees down there in winter. You actually get more people fainting in the underground during winter than in summer, when it is also insufferably hot. But in winter, people are also wearing all of these, like, coats and things. So the earth itself is actually very capable of holding onto, working as this heat battery. It works really well. In this place in Canada, there's another example, a Finnish company who've done this as well. They're using sand instead. This massive silo filled with sand, and they sort of heat the sand up to this crazy numbers, like sort of 500 degrees C using renewable energy in the summer, and then blow air through it in the winter to give them heat back. The only problem with this is that if you wanted to install one of these batteries yourself, if you wanted to, like, okay, you know what? I can dig down however many. I could dig a kilometer down under my own house and have my own little battery.
- [07:08]
B
That's what I think.
- [07:09]
A
I know that's what you're thinking. The slight problem with this is that, I mean, it's. The square cube law is going on here, right? Which is this. Actually, the surface area to volume ratio needs to be. You basically need to do it for a lot of houses simultaneously for the heat not to escape. You need like 50 houses at once. But if, you know, if Francois, you happen to be a housing developer who wants to, like, heavily invest in minimizing energy bills for the future of your potential homeowners, then, I mean, this is a great way to do it. Just as long as you don't mind a bit of sand in your. In your water, in your shower.
- [07:46]
B
Or your air.
- [07:47]
A
Or your air. Exactly.
- [07:49]
B
Ah, turn on the dust storm. I'm getting chilly.
- [07:55]
A
Okay, next question. We had one question come in from guy from Slovenia, in fact, who said, do you think there will ever be a tool, an invention that humanity creates which would let Us gaze into a different dimension.
- [08:09]
B
Oh, wow. I love this question because it's. I. I hope so much that before I leave this Earth, I get to look in a direction that isn't one of the three I was born into.
- [08:23]
A
So boring looking in the same three directions the entire time.
- [08:26]
B
I know. I think that there's so much more out there. I feel like Belle from Beauty and the Beast. It's just. I'm just this provincial 3D blob. And I desperately want to not look up, down, left, right, forward, backward, but I want to look anacata. And I think that, you know, things like, oh, we'll look in a history book. Then you're, you know, looking through time. A fourth dimension. I'm like, no, I want it to be spatial. And I think that the closest we are is unsatisfying. We can see the results, for example, of dimensional change. Look in a mirror, and every time you look in a mirror, you are looking at yourself as you would appear if you had been rotated in a fourth dimension. Through a fourth dimension, you can think about this as, like an L shape. If this is stuck in a plane and it's moving around, around, it can never become this unless it gets rotated in a third dimension outside of the plane. And if we do that to our bodies, we wind up just like this, getting mirror reversed. So when I see my mirror image, I'm seeing what I would look like if someone from a fourth dimension grabbed me and rotated me out beyond these three dimensions that I live in. We have a lot of computer simulations that can simulate four dimensional objects. Right. There are a lot of amazing games that allow you to do this, but they only show you three dimensions. And then the object, like, leaves for a little while, or part of it leaves and comes back in and you go, oh, it was transformed in more dimensions than I can perceive. Interesting. But it's not just the effects that I want. It's the. The actual direction. And I feel like it's too late for me. I think that children might be able. If we catch them early enough, they might be able to see. I think they're the tool because they haven't been ingrained into the three dimensions yet. Like, you know how if you look at kids, they'll. Sometimes when they're learning to form letters, they'll write words backwards and mirror reversed. It looks like an amazing feat that would be hard for me to do as an adult. And they're just like, oh, yep. And they write their name. Everything's perfectly reversed because to them this and this are the same shape. Like they, they understand what is the same between anatomorphs, between mirror image pairs. And we unlearn that as we become more familiar with the universe that we live in. I do have somewhere a four dimensional Rubik's cube. Let me see if I can find it. I don't think I've put on my wall yet. Let me look in the chill room, which maybe I'll show you guys one of these days.
- [11:10]
A
Chill as in cold or chill as in cool?
- [11:13]
B
Both. I'm so sorry. I don't know where the heck it is. It doesn't matter because I forget which kind of moves are allowed on it. So I would just make a fool of myself. But if you, if you, if you look up four dimensional Rubik's Cube. Melinda Green, a long time ago, made an interactive website where you can solve a four dimensional Rubik's Cube. It can be rotated in the three dimensions we're used to. But also this fourth one that kind of turns it inside out and it's phenomenal. And she's actually invented a physical version. And I've been talking to her about, like, how do we make more of these? And, and what would you do if you had, you know, more resources? And she's like, ah, I would put lines on them to represent the, like, geodesics. And I'm very excited for it.
- [12:04]
A
That sounds really cool. I mean, impossible, but really cool. I do like the idea though, of just getting a child as young as possible and then just being to them, like demanding to point where the fourth dimension is. Because they're the only ones who can possibly know.
- [12:19]
B
Exactly. They're the only ones. And from there maybe Guy, we could invent a tool to actually see it for ourselves.
- [12:29]
A
What if, though? What if we are like Belle and actually once we do get to the fourth or other dimensions, all that's to be found is beasts.
- [12:38]
B
But they won't really be beasts, but there will be Gastons who are afraid of that knowledge. That new vista that's been opened and they will say, kill the beast. Kill the fourth dimension. Build walls to block it. And they may be right. But should they be right?
- [12:55]
A
Thing is, Michael, I think Beauty and the Beast was originally written as a little story that you would tell you young, very young girls who are about to be married off to scary old.
- [13:07]
B
Rich men to make them okay with it.
- [13:09]
A
It's like you think he's a beast because he is.
- [13:13]
B
But maybe if you put in a lot of work, you can fix him. Well, look, the fourth dimension is my old rich man. And I am jumping into. I'm jumping into this relationship with both feet. Okay.
- [13:30]
A
Yeah. Give me the candlestick, the teapot, and off we go. Okay. Amazing.
- [13:37]
B
Let's move on to a question from Henry. Why does gravity bend light if light has no mass?
- [13:45]
A
It's a great question, isn't it? It's a great question, yeah. And the thing is, is that. That doesn't make any sense if you stick to the, to Newton's idea of what light is, of what gravity is. Sorry, that it's like it's something that acts on. But Einstein's version of gravity is that it's not the light that's bending, it's the space around the light that is bending. And that is why it appears to bend. It's not that it's like having a gravitational pull or gravitational effect. And I know that actually we did this whole episode on gravity and we talked about. There's sort of slight problems with, with imagining it as though it's a. It's. It's a bowling ball on a rubber sheet, which is the, the one that sort of. People talk about quite a lot. But there's a. There's a slightly simpler way to think about this, I think. Imagine if you're standing a. In an elevator in a lift, and you've got a laser, and you're sort of pointing the laser over at the other side, hitting the wall directly opposite the elevator. And then all of a sudden there's like a rocket engine under the elevator that blasts off, accelerating the. The elevator up extremely fast. Now, the thing is, is that while the floor is rushing up, while the light is traveling across the room, the floor underneath it is rushing upwards so quickly that it means that by light hits the wall, the wall will have moved up. So to you standing on the inside of the elevator, it looks like the laser beam is curving downwards because you're moving up incredibly fast. And what Einstein realized, essentially, that's like the bending of the light, as it were. And what Einstein realized is that acceleration feels exactly the same as gravity. Those two things, the feeling of them, as it were, is sort of indistinguishable. If you wake up in a windowless box and you feel heavy, you don't know whether you're on Earth or whether you're in a ROC that's accelerating at 1G. And so if acceleration can bend light, then gravity must also bend light. And the proof of this came in, the really remarkable proof of Einstein's Ideas came in 1919, there was a big eclipse. For years, it was just this cool theory, right? But then this total solar eclipse happened. And astronomers in 1919 went to the site of the eclipse and they looked at stars that were directly behind the sun. Now, if light didn't bend, then during the total eclipse, you shouldn't be able to see them.
- [16:11]
B
Right.
- [16:11]
A
You'd have to wait for different moments in the year, different times, to be able to see those stars. But because the sun's gravity bends the light from those stars around, during the total solar eclipse, those stars appeared next to the sun, and that the position of them, the position of those stars was shifted by exactly the amount that Einstein had predicted. And that experiment, that was what really made Einstein this celebrity overnight.
- [16:40]
B
Superstar.
- [16:41]
A
Superstar. Yeah. He proved that light doesn't need mass to be pushed around. It just needs this road that it follows.
- [16:48]
B
Yeah. The space time that it travels through is being curved, and the light is just traveling in the geodesic, the straight line path, and whoops, it happens to be curved. Guess I went around the sun into your eyeball. Peekaboo.
- [17:02]
A
This is really why Einstein has the reputation that he does. This is why everyone is still, you know, a hundred and whatever years later, still so completely flawed by the unimaginable foresight of this man. Like, to be able to sit in a room and have a thought experiment like that elevator, and conclude from it that during a total eclipse, you should still be able to see the stars that are hiding behind the sun and then ending up being correct. I mean, that really is just phenomenal.
- [17:36]
B
I mean, I mean, that's the dream. Your ideas are testable. They are tested in your lifetime. And you were right. You predicted things we had not observed before.
- [17:48]
A
Absolutely. Well, okay. From predicting things that have not been observed before to hearing stories that have not been told before. Join us back after the break.
- [18:04]
B
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK, who over the past 50 years have helped double cancer survival in the UK.
- [18:12]
A
You might have heard of BRCA genes. These are the ones that made headlines when Angelina Jolie revealed that she carried a faulty version.
- [18:18]
B
Yeah. BRCA genes are part of our DNA. They help to repair cells and keep them healthy. The risk comes when BRCA genes are faulty and about 1 in 400 people inherit a faulty version, increasing the risk of some cancers.
- [18:32]
A
Yeah. Now, this discovery came From Cancer Research UK scientists who came across the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, a breakthrough that changed how doctors prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer. And now we've got genetic testing that means that people who have faulty BRCA genes can take steps to prevent cancer or to receive tailored treatment.
- [18:51]
B
Yeah. The discovery also revealed a weakness in cancer. By turning that flaw against the disease, researchers developed PARP inhibitors, targeted drugs that are now helping thousands of people.
- [19:03]
A
And all of this really points to a future where medicine is no longer just one size fits all. It's something that's, that's informed by your own DNA. So for more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, and visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience. This episode is brought to you by Thriver. Every January, we make ambitious health decisions, usually with surprisingly little real information. We change things and often just hope for the best.
- [19:38]
B
Which is strange because we'll track things like our steps and our sleep obsessively. But what's actually going on inside our bodies, it's often total guesswork.
- [19:47]
A
Thriver is built to fix that. It's a proactive health platform built around regular at home blood tests so you can understand what's really going on inside your body.
- [19:56]
B
You can track over 50 biomarkers across things like heart health, metabolic health, hormones and nutrition. And Thriva doesn't just hand you numbers. It explains what they mean, how they're changing over time and what you might want to do next. Grounded in evidence and not guesswork.
- [20:12]
A
And then the app pulls everything together for you. Your blood results, your trends over time, and wearable insights like sleep movement and cardio fitness. So the bigger picture actually makes sense.
- [20:23]
B
Go to Thriva Co to get started. That's T H R I v a co use code tris for 20% off your first blood test. The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot. All right, welcome back. Hannah. Have you ever had your mind experimented on by scientists?
- [21:17]
A
Not knowingly.
- [21:20]
B
Well, good. One of these days I'd like to do some on your brain. But today I want to talk about the scariest experiments I've been a part of. I did this a lot in college for money. You could go in and make a few bucks by taking a survey. Or you could make dozens of bucks by having them do An MRI scan on you.
- [21:42]
A
Are you one of the weird people that they talk about the idea that psychology experiments are largely done on a particular type of person?
- [21:50]
B
Exactly. They're done by college undergrads who want five bucks to get a Big Mac, you know, and so, yeah, I was one of those people that, like, the foundations of psychology are built on and continue to be built on. And. And I remember one time I did this MRI study, and while they calibrated the machine, they had me watch a movie, and I could pick a movie. And it was clear that they had three movies to choose from. One was for women, one was for men, and one was for children. And the movie for children was Air Bud. And I'd never seen airbud, so I'm like, yeah, I'll do Air Bud. So I'm watching airbud in this MRI machine while they calibrate the magnets to my brain. And the amount of time it took for them to calibrate the machine was the amount of time it takes for the kid in the movie to realize the dog can play basketball. So I got to watch everything but the dog play basketball. And I was so upset, it wasn't worth the 50 bucks I got paid. And I'm still mad about it. I still haven't seen Air Bud.
- [22:50]
A
Did they not give you the option to continue the film?
- [22:54]
B
No. They were like, all right, now the experiment must commence. And I had to, like, recognize patterns and stuff. And I'm like, please put the dog back on the screen now. I've seen clips of the dog playing basketball, and I did a whole episode about whether or not a dog could play basketball according to the rules of the state that the movie appears in. I won't spoil it, but the conclusions were quite surprising. Anyway, psychological experiments is what we're talking about. When I was in high school, I had a psychology teacher that got me into psychology. It's why I studied psychology in college. But all he really did is play us videos. He played Candid Camera clips and then would talk about the psychology that was part of the prank we were watching. You know, Candid Camera is a TV show where people get pranked. Pranks are a big thing on the Internet now, and they can be amusing, they can sometimes be cruel, but often, almost all the time. You're learning a lot about how humans behave and how we think. So I envisioned doing a prank show that was actually psychological experiments, because so many experiments on human psychology are basically tricking people into thinking one thing and seeing what they do. And so In Minefield, we did a lot of experiments that were, you know, pretty, pretty intense. We actually recreated the trolley problem, right? We developed this intense ruse where people thought they were coming in to review these new high speed railcar interiors, right? Is the fabric soft? Are the colors good? Is the lighting good? But then there was a delay and they had to go and wait in this air conditioned room because it was a hot day. There was a switching room and this old man that we hired who used to switch railroad cars like teaches them, yeah, I have to switch the lines because these guys are coming to work on it and whatever he shows them and he's an affable guy and they get to do it themselves while they wait and then he has to leave the room and boom, the trolley problem happens.
- [24:55]
A
The trolley problem being the idea that the question, normally theoretical, but apparently not in your case of whether you. There is a trolley careering down a track and is set on a, on a path where it's going to kill five people or whatever it might be, and you have the choice to pull a lever to redirect the trolley, the train as it were, so that it only kills one. The question is, do you do it?
- [25:22]
B
Yeah. So what would you do?
- [25:26]
A
So it's really, I mean the whole point of this, this like theoretical thought experiment was to demonstrate how sometimes there isn't a clear answer to an ethical question. Because if you take the, the utilitarian approach, right, which is like count up how many lives are saved, then then you say, well obviously you should pull the lever. You know, there's five people on, on if you do nothing and then there's one person if you, if you pull the lever. But then, I mean, then there's also like the sort of value ethics, value based ethics which says, okay, but the murder, you are effectively murdering somebody because it's your intervention which is choosing somebody's death. You're choosing to intervene in a situation and the person's death is a direct consequence of that. I personally, I don't know what I would do in that situation. I think I would really, I think I would struggle to pull the lever, if I'm honest.
- [26:15]
B
Yeah, it's a struggle because yes, if I pull the lever then only one person dies, not five, but they died because of my action. I feel a lot more responsibility over it. I've got to talk to that person's family and say, yeah, they would have been okay if I hadn't done it. I did save five people, but what had never been done was testing it in real life, if you actually put people in that position. So there were CCTV cameras broadcast all over this switch room, so you could see the tracks, and you could see that a worker went on to the side track while five were working on the regular track. And the authority figure, right, the guy who's employed to switch the tracks has left. And these alarms start going off like, person on track, train approaching, train approaching. What do you do? And as it turns out, people don't do anything. They freeze. There's fight or flight, but there's also freeze. And that is the most common behavior that we saw. Now, we had to have an actual psychiatrist on set to debrief people to tell them everyone's okay. This was all not real. And the decision you made is not something that should bother you. You know, you really helped science today because people were really broken up about the fact that they did nothing. And we needed to make sure. And we followed up with them a couple of weeks afterwards because you don't want to traumatize people into thinking I'm the kind of person who wouldn't pull the lever. I allowed five people to be killed instead of one. So it's a, it's a really serious thing, but that's it.
- [27:51]
A
You're learning. You are learning something about yourself.
- [27:53]
B
You're learning something about yourself. And so we, we had to sit down and tell every person afterwards. You know, first of all, obviously, everyone's fine. Those are all actors. You were watching pre recorded segments where no one was in danger. But the decision that you made is the right one. You know, there is no decision that is fair. And to put you in that position was not fair. So you shouldn't leave thinking I did the wrong thing. But that wasn't the scariest episode for me because I just got to watch people do it. For me, the most fear I felt, it wasn't when I went to Peru and drank ayahuasca with a shaman in the middle of the rainforest. It was a experiment we did in partnership with Philip Zimbardo, the guy who was behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, where a bunch of college students were taken in during the summer and some were assigned to be guards and some were assigned to be prisoners. And they started treating each other so badly, like physically abusively, that he had to end the experiment. And he was like, holy cow. If you give people authority and no oversight, they just abuse it. It's a famous experiment which we did a whole episode on, but we also did one on how to make a hero. And we Wanted to test if people would truly become a whistleblower. If we put people in a situation where something was being done that was wrong and it was up to them to stop it, would they? If you ask, In a survey, 95% of people say, of course I would come forward, but in real life, it's a lot more complicated. And so we rented out a wing of a psychology department at a university in Los Angeles and posed as real experimenters. And we were bringing in people to place phone calls to get us subjects for the experiments. And we told them, you know, we're looking at isolation. We're going to put people in isolation for 10 days. Now in the show, I had done three days, and that is around the maximum where someone starts to lose their grip on reality. There's a lot of anxiety and fears and also just depression feelings of your life isn't worth it. And we told this to these recruiters and we said, yeah, it's really dangerous. Here's a list of all the things that could go wrong and all of the mental problems that could be caused by it. But it's important for science that we do this. And during the informative sessions, like, half of the people in that room were confederates who worked for us. And that was, for part, later in the experiment, I also receive a phone call at some point during the orientation where I'm told that the experiment has not been approved by the university's Ethical Review Board and that it cannot continue.
- [30:48]
A
So at this point, then the people who you are who are on Candid Camera, effectively, they know that this is not good. And not only that is not approved.
- [31:00]
B
It's not approved. And they overhear this conversation because part of it's on speakerphone and then I switch it and then I say, look, you know, I'll deal with this later. Like, we need to. We need to start doing this now. And every single person agreed to go ahead and phone bank for me to get recruits. And we had them call actors who were trained to ask, like, is this safe? And the recruiters, just, like, they worked for me, they lied and they said, oh, yeah, no, this is. This is really safe and you're going to be fine and it's going to be like a vacation.
- [31:36]
A
And they actually lied or they conceal? I mean, were they like, I guess there's like a spectrum of lying, right? Like, were they just sort of concealing and saying they didn't know or were they actually lying?
- [31:48]
B
Most of them didn't directly lie. There were some who were almost happy to say Yep. This is, like, probably even good for you. Others, they lied in really interesting ways where they would say. They would be asked, what are the. What are the risks involved? And they would say, well, there's nothing toxic. There's no electric shocks. They. They just mentioned true things that weren't a problem to avoid mentioning the actual known problems of forced isolation. And we then had our confederates come in and say, hey, I'm starting to feel bad about this. I don't think we should be doing this to give the real participants an opportunity to say, yeah, I'm leaving, or I'm gonna make a phone call. Right. And this is all filmed on hidden cameras.
- [32:37]
A
How many of them did. How many of them said that they wanted out?
- [32:40]
B
None. Still. No one. No one said anything. They just said, well, you know, it's what we're hired to do, basically. And then we had a woman come in to the rooms where they were. The cubicles where they were doing the phone calls, who said she was from the Ethical Review Board and wanted to know what they were calling about. And they all confessed that it was for the experiment involving isolation. And we did this for two days, and only one person agreed to go on record accusing me of violating the Ethic Review Board's decision. Everyone admitted that they were doing it and that it was wrong and that they felt bad doing it, but they just wanted to not be a part of it. First of all, there's a million things going on here. Was it loyalty to me? Was it dedication to the job they were hired for? The most common rationalization was that it was important for science that we do this. And that was also what Stanley Milgram heard the most from his participants when he, many decades ago, asked people to. To administer electric shocks to participants that weren't real, but they thought were real. When asked, why did you go ahead and, like, do what the experimenter said and shock people so badly? They said, well, it was for science. It was for learning. It was worth it.
- [34:04]
A
I mean, the background of that Stanley Milgram experiment is, I mean, darker still. It was after the Nuremberg trials, when Nazis were accused of participating in this horrific moment in history, of participating in the deaths of millions of people. And people's defense was, well, I was just doing my job. And the Milgram experiments were to say, you know, how far will people go? How far will people harm each other if they're told to do so by somebody in a white coat and a clipboard? And it turns out very far, they'll.
- [34:37]
B
Go very far, even for something as simple as like a minimum wage phone banking job to recruit test subjects. It's, it's almost like it's hardwired into us to be loyal to the job and do what we are told by authority. And in a lot of ways I think the guilt can be diffused onto the system that's asking you to do it. Look, I'm just a small part in this. Like it's not really up to me. I don't want to lose my job. I don't want to get in trouble from my employer. So I'll just go ahead and tell people there are no known risks. And everyone did it. It was scary for me because I had to be the unethical experimenter. I had to answer the recruiter's questions when they said, well, when are you going to tell people that this is dangerous? And I'm like, oh, we'll debrief them afterwards on the known risks afterwards. And I had to pretend like this didn't bother me and I want to be liked. I think it's part of being a YouTuber. I just am a people pleaser. And I really, really had a hard time psychologically with two days of being evil, but then having no pushback. Only one person ever pushed back and never to me. They told the, the authority figure, my boss who showed up, they told her, yeah, he shouldn't be doing this. And yes, one person said, I will go on record and say that I did this and that I was told to do this.
- [36:18]
A
It does. I wonder whether we should do a whole episode on that Milgram experiment and talking about this sort of tendency of humans in more detail. Because I think that the research on it is absolutely fascinating and it feels quite dark in a lot of ways that actually once you have that intersection of moral responsibility, but with sort of financial reward, with like societal expectation, with like systems and norms, actually we really do struggle to, to buck the trend and stand up. I mean it reminds me quite a bit of the bystander effect.
- [36:54]
B
Yes.
- [36:54]
A
Which is, is, is, is this idea. I mean it's not quite as bad as I think the very, the, the, the first sort of tellings of the bystander effect made it sound, sound really horrific. There's like this, this paper in the 1960s that said somebody was stabbed to death in New York and 38 people saw it and nobody did anything.
- [37:13]
B
Kitty Genovese. Yeah, a real murder with, with witnesses all around and not a single person called the police or intervened.
- [37:23]
A
But I think in the, over time actually that, that idea of 38 people watching on was a little bit of an exaggeration and I think, think that a couple of people had actually called the police. It was sort of, it was a bit of an exaggeration by journalists. But you do see this bystander effect in the psychological experiments that you're describing where you get people in particular, when you have smoke filling in a room and actors that are not reacting, people sort of assume that it's not really their problem. Or you have some students who are sort of sitting in a room and over an intercom they hear the sound of somebody else having a seizure or crying for help or something. And very, very few people will intervene. But it's sort of like people can reason, reason that this isn't their problem, that there's somebody else who will step in and fix it.
- [38:08]
B
Yeah, the seizure one. I remember an experiment where people were doing some task that was obviously just a filler task over headphones. Everyone was in their own little cubicle and they heard the people they were working with over headphones. And in one condition, there were like four people all listening together and talking together. And then the other people were alone with just them and one other person. And if the other person they're listening to faked having a seizure or a heart attack, the other person listening immediately got up and went for help. But if there were, if they believe there were four people on this line and one of them had a heart attack, they would just keep sitting there for a while because surely someone else is going to do something.
- [38:56]
A
Right? The thing is, is that, I mean, in these experiments that sort of. Because it's a lab setting, because it's sort of a constructed setting. When you watch back videos of genuine disasters. Right. So real emergency situations, kind of real high stakes scenarios, actually. I mean, you often do see people who step up. And I think that the, the original idea of the bystander effect is that the more people that there are, like on your phone call, the more people there are, the less it's my problem to do something. Whereas I think in situations where you have, I don't know, like someone wielding a knife, for instance, actually the more people there are, the more likely it is that people will step in and, and try to mount a response. It's much less scary when you feel as though there's sort of safety in numbers. So it's maybe not quite as, as depressing as sometimes the telling of this. But there is still something in there though, right? Of like personal responsibility versus collective responsibility. I also wonder whether there's like a international dimension to this, the trolley problem that you described right at the beginning. One of the most fascinating experiments that I've seen done on the trolley problem was in the sort of the early excitement about driverless cars. Maybe around 2018 or so, there was a group of scientists who set up an online game where you could go and play the trolley problem with a driverless car, but it would give you lots of different options. So your driverless car could run over five people or one person, the traditional version, or it could run over a couple or an old granny or a cat, or a mum and a baby and so on and so on and so on, and would present you with these problems. And what was completely fascinating about that was the breakdown of. Of how different cultures valued different things. How some cultures, particularly in Japan, really cared a lot about. Older people would sort of would prioritize them right at the top. Whereas other cultures, Western cultures, for instance, you know, cared about children much more. Everyone cares about cats. That's, I think, the other thing that came on a bit. But we should definitely do some episodes digging more into your psychology part.
- [41:03]
B
Well, yeah, because there are just so many factors. Yeah, people in groups can be better, but they can also be worse than they are alone. And what factors cause it to go one way or the other, we're still learning about. And we also still have open questions about the hypotheticals themselves. How valid are they? Because in a lab setting, that's very different than real life. If you're programming a autopilot car to, you know, favor young couples with a baby over old people, is that really a real choice in real life? Because in real life, what the car will do is it will stop itself, it will drive off the road, it'll crash itself into a wall. Like there's always some other option that isn't the simple this person or that person.
- [41:52]
A
I always thought it was really interesting how if you're following the trolley problem logic, you want the car to crash itself rather than crash into people. But who's going to buy a car? Who will buy a car that will crash and potentially hurt the people driving it rather than other people instead?
- [42:08]
B
Exactly, yeah. Yeah. We haven't talked about the train. What's it carrying? What if it's got 12 people on it?
- [42:17]
A
What if it's got a million embryos on it? Actually, Immy, one of our producers, she's just pointing out that there's this idea of inflicted insights. The idea that there's trauma to learning something about yourself, that you can't unknow. And that psychologists really start to discuss this a lot after the Milgram experiment.
- [42:39]
B
Inflicted insight. What a great phrase. Yeah. We encountered that so often in Minefield, and I encountered it personally. Like, the reason I disliked how to Make a Hero was that I learned how easy it was to get away with bad stuff. Right. I think we live our lives thinking, oh, I couldn't do that. I'll get caught. But then here I am, literally being an evil, manipulative scientist, and everyone's just eating it out of my hand. Like, yeah, of course it's interesting, the.
- [43:08]
A
Idea that being powerful and evil made you feel uncomfortable. Sometimes I'd do this thing where I'll, like, have a day or two where I will deliberately not get out of the way of anybody when I'm walking down the road. Hannah, have you ever tried this?
- [43:22]
B
No. I'm not a sociopath.
- [43:26]
A
Like, go down Oxford street or something. Like a really, really busy, busy road. And just, like, I'm not getting out of the way. And everybody does move around you. It's like you feel so powerful and so evil and I can't keep it up. But it's fun to do for, like, a moment. And then, you know, I think it's.
- [43:43]
B
Probably a good lesson that, yeah, we are a lot more powerful than we think and allow ourselves to be, maybe for good reason, but it's fragile that. The barrier between the two.
- [43:52]
A
Well, there you go. We've. We've learned about some of the scariest things on the planet there, then, Michael, which is ourselves. So if you've got any questions that you would like us to answer, you can send them in@therealScienceOHanger.com and you can.
- [44:06]
B
Join our newsletter at thereestis.com science we.
- [44:11]
A
Are going to be back next Thursday with another edition of Field Notes and on Tuesday with our normal episode.
- [44:17]
B
Until then, stay curious. Bye. Bye.