Learn about why flipping a coin might be your best bet when making major life decisions; why otters juggle rocks; and how you respond differently to 2 types of injustice.
Learn about why flipping a coin might be your best bet when making major life decisions; why otters juggle rocks; and how you respond differently to 2 types of injustice.
An economist had people make big life decisions on a coin flip, and they ended up happier by Steffie Drucker
We finally found out why otters juggle rocks by Kelsey Donk
There are 2 Types of Injustice and You Respond Differently to Each of Them by Ashley Hamer
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/making-life-decisions-on-a-coin-flip-how-you-respond-to-2-types-of-injustice-and-why-otters-juggle-rocks
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why flipping a coin might be your best bet when making major life decisions; why otters juggle rocks; and how you respond differently to 2 types of injustice.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Have you ever left a choice up to the flip of a coin? A new study found that people who followed through on those coin-flip decisions ended up happier — and that says something important about how we make decisions.
Even though economics has a lot to say about how people think about making decisions, it says nothing about whether a decision they make is the right one. Economist Steven Levitt, co-author of the 2005 book “Freakonomics” was perturbed by this fact.
So Levitt set out to fill this gap by putting up a website that let people make decisions with a coin toss. It provided a list of possible decisions and let people choose the one that most matched the decision they were trying to make. Those decisions ranged from big ones, like whether to quit a job or propose to a romantic partner, to smaller ones, like whether to go on a diet or get a tattoo. Each choice was designated heads or tails: heads you make the change, tails you don’t. Levitt also encouraged coin flippers to have a friend or family member verify the outcome of the toss and whether they followed through with it.
You might not think many people would seek out a virtual coin toss to make a major life decision — much less do what the coin told them to — but Levitt’s website racked up more than 20,000 tosses in one year. And an impressive two-thirds of those coin tossers submitted follow-up surveys.
So what happened? Well, the coin toss did influence people’s decisions: by six months, people had followed the coin’s advice more often than they’d predicted they would beforehand. More importantly, though, was what happened to those who were told to make a change — that is, they got heads instead of tails and had to, say, quit their job instead of stay put. Those who made a change were more likely to have actually done it and report greater happiness on the follow-up survey. And those who made a major change were happiest down the line.
This study suggests that people are biased toward sticking with the status quo, even though changing it up generally leads to greater happiness. That lines up with other research showing that people’s biggest regrets in life are about things they didn’t do, not things they did. Levitt summarized the results this way: quote, “If the results are correct, then admonitions such as “winners never quit and quitters never win,” while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.” end quote.
Quitting the status quo and trying something new is scary, but science says it’s usually worth it. If you’re having trouble deciding, though, you can always flip a coin.
Otters are adorable. They backfloat holding hands, they keep snacks in little pockets under their arms, and — did you know this? — they juggle. I mean, it’s not real juggling, obviously, but they do toss little rocks back and forth between their paws. Thanks to a recent study, we may finally know why they do that. Researchers have found that rock juggling is a sign of hunger.
Why would someone research juggling otters, you ask? Because animal play is a huge area of scientific debate. Scientists really want to be able to explain why play evolved, but there are so many different types of play and it’s so hard to study in a controlled way that there are dozens of competing theories out there.
Which is why researchers from the University of Exeter turned to otters. Otters juggle rocks regularly enough to make it a useful play behavior to study. Both young and old otters juggle, from pretty much every otter species.
Before, scientists had just assumed that juggling was practice for food foraging. Just like cats pounce on their toys in the same way they pounce on mice, otters might be manipulating these non-food objects so when it came time to pull food out of crab shells, they’d be ready.
But for that to be the reason, you’d need to show that the otters that juggled more often got better at foraging for food. So the team gathered individuals from two different otter species and gave them three puzzles. The otters had to figure out how to retrieve food from a screw-top bottle, from a tennis ball with a hole in it, and from in-between two oversized Lego bricks.
The researchers also recorded how often each otter juggled, along with looking at several other possible reasons for juggling: things like sex, age, and hunger levels.
It turns out that the otters who juggled most often weren’t any better at getting their food out of puzzles. So that disproved the theory that they juggle to practice foraging. The researchers also didn’t notice any differences in juggling frequency between the sexes. They did notice that the youngest and oldest otters juggled the most, which suggests that this behavior can change through an otter’s life.
But hunger levels turned out to be the all-important factor. Otters juggle more when they’re hungry. As the otters in the study got closer to feeding time, they started tossing rocks. So while it isn’t certain, it’s possible that otters juggle because they’re excited to eat.
It didn’t seem like otters could get any cuter. But otters juggling rocks because they’re so excited to eat — that really makes me miss the zoo.
Nobody likes injustice — but not all injustice is created equal. Like sometimes, bad things happen to good people; other times, good things happen to bad people. According to research, observers respond differently to each of those scenarios. And that means some efforts to restore justice are easier than others.
Righting those wrongs comes down to two types of justice: researchers call punishment for wrongdoing retributive justice; and they call compensation for having something done to you compensatory justice. And studies suggest that retributive justice is a lot more important to us than compensatory justice. For example, a 2009 study had people imagine a pickpocket stealing from someone. It found that people recommended the pickpocket return more money to their victim if the sum was framed as punishment for the pickpocket than if it was framed as compensation for the victim.
But another study went a little further by having volunteers play a version of something called “the dictator game.” Three players were assigned the role of decider, receiver, or observer. In every round, the decider would be given $20 and had to decide how much of it to share with the receiver. At the end, one player would be chosen at random to win or lose $25 — the game’s version of injustice. Then, the observer could use their own money to either reward the decider's good behavior or punish their bad behavior.
Turns out when there was no injustice — that is, nobody won or lost that $25 — participants were equally likely to compensate good people as to punish bad people. But when injustice was in the mix, participants compensated good people 76 percent of the time but punished bad people only 36 percent of the time.
That might sound like that 2009 study was wrong — these participants seemed to value compensation over punishment. But that wasn’t exactly true: when the participants did punish bad people, they spent significantly more to do so.
So why the mismatch? Researchers think it might be because people want punishment to be thorough to ensure the bad act doesn’t happen again. One person can’t always afford the time or money that requires, so they may just give up without trying. But even small acts of compensation are seen as enough to make a person feel like they’ve restored justice to someone who’s been wronged.
If this bothers you, remember that righting the world’s wrongs isn’t an all-or-nothing game, so do what you can. Every little bit helps.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Kelsey Donk, and Steffie Drucker, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!