In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories — and discuss injury odds with the National Safety Council’s Ken Kolosh, manager of statistics — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Reactance Is Why You Act Irrationally When Your Freedom Is Threatened Paying With a Credit Card Makes You Spend More Money These Are the 6 Best Cities for Biking in the US More from Ken Kolosh: Injury Facts: The Source for Injury Stats | National Safety Council Odds of Dying | Injury Facts, National Safety Council Ken Kolosh Is Figuring Out All the Weird Ways You Might Die | Newsweek Journal of Safety Research | ScienceDirect Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories — and discuss injury odds with the National Safety Council’s Ken Kolosh, manager of statistics — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
More from Ken Kolosh:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/odds-of-dying-w-ken-kolosh-reactance-credit-card-psychology-and-best-biking-cities
[THEME MUSIC] CODY GOUGH: Hi, we've got three stories from curiosity.com plus a special guest to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you'll learn why you act out when your freedom is taken away, the best cities for biking in the US, and how paying with a credit card changes the way you spend your money.
CODY GOUGH: We also got some help from a special guest to answer a listener question. Nick wanted to know how people calculate the probability of someone dying from something, like a car or a plane.
ASHLEY HAMER: We'll give you a look behind the numbers and more in our conversation with Ken Kolosh, manager of statistics with the National Safety Council.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Ashley, do you ever have the instinct to do the opposite of what you're told to do?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes. A lot. Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: I'm extremely, extremely guilty of this.
ASHLEY HAMER: I can get really stubborn.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: I'm glad we've never butted heads. Well, today we wrote about a psychological quirk that I have not seen super widely discussed. It's a name for when humans act out, sometimes irrationally, when they think their freedom is under threat. We do it to reestablish our sense that we're free, and psychologists call this "reactants." I am so glad there's a term for this.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: If someone feels like you're bossing them around, then it'll trigger reactants, and they're not likely to see your perspective. In fact, people often do the opposite of what a bossy person says to do. In one study, for example, a judge warned a mock jury to disregard certain evidence that was inadmissible, but the judge didn't explain why. That jury used that evidence to make their final decision despite what the judge had told them to do.
But you don't have to be in a courtroom to feel this. A lot of things we think of as bad news can be seen as a loss of freedom. Like when you're injured or sick, that takes away your physical freedom. When you get dumped, that means you lose the freedom to see your partner and your freedom to be the one who does the breaking up. And getting fired is also a double whammy.
Now, reactants doesn't mean humans inherently dislike rules and constraints. We do like limits. In fact, too many choices can make us unhappy. Limited freedom doesn't trigger reactants. It's triggered when you feel like the freedoms you already have are slipping away. Now, if you have to give bad news to somebody, you can get around triggering reactants by offering a built-in choice.
If you're breaking up, for example, then say, you decide who gets to keep the blender we got for Christmas, and offer an immediate constructive activity that'll soak up some adrenaline. Like if you're someone's boss, you could say, we have to cut your pay, and can you please walk down to HR to get some paperwork? Granting the illusion of freedom and giving someone an active distraction can help keep lashing out to a minimum.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, how often do you carry cash?
CODY GOUGH: Basically, never.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, me too.
CODY GOUGH: And I always want to.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: I always try to tip in cash specifically, just because it's just more convenient for the servers.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is. Well, we all might want to start carrying cash, because research has shown that you actually spend more when you're carrying around your credit card. Here's the scoop. A 2001 study out of MIT found that bidders in an auction were willing to pay an average of 83% more when paying with a credit card than they were when paying in cash. In some cases, they were willing to pay more than twice as much. But why?
A 2011 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that paying with a credit card actually changes how you see products. Credit cards make you focus on a product's benefits, while cash makes you focus on its cost. Studies show that even when there's just a credit card logo on a check tray, you end up leaving higher tips, even if you're paying in cash. So they have a pretty major psychological effect. Part of this is because when you pay with cash, you're handing over something physical. But when you swipe a card, the amount is just a number, and you don't even have to deal with really paying it until the end of the month.
Now, we can't all always carry cash, but there are ways to help curb overspending. Try changing how you think. You can try thinking about money in terms of hours of your life, and treating responsible spending like a daily habit rather than a long-term goal. Check in on your emotions before spending using the halt method, as in H-A-L.T, to make sure you're not doing it because you're hungry, anxious, lonely, or tired. We hope that helps.
CODY GOUGH: Before we hear from today's guest, quick note that support for Curiosity Daily comes from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. Let's talk about buying a home for a second. Because of rising interest rates, there's a lot of unpredictability when it comes to buying a home these days. It's causing a lot of anxiety with folks. Well, at our friends at Quicken Loans are doing something about that.
ASHLEY HAMER: They're calling it the "power-buying process." Here's how it works. Quicken Loans will verify your income, assets, and credit in less than 24 hours to give you a verified approval. This gives you the strength of a cash buyer. Then, once you're verified, you qualify for their all-new, exclusive RateShield Approval. First, they'll lock your rate for up to 90 days while you shop.
Now here's the best part. If rates go up, your rate stays the same. But if rates go down, your rate also drops. Either way, you win.
CODY GOUGH: It's the kind of thinking you'd expect from America's largest mortgage lender. To get started, go to rocketmortgage.com. RateShield Approval, only valid on certain 30-year purchase transactions. Additional conditions or exclusions may apply. Based on Quicken Loans data in comparison to public data records. Equal Housing Lender. Licensed in all 50 states. Nmlsconsumeraccess.org number 3030.
Let's answer a listener question. Our awesome listener Nick emailed us and asked, "How do people calculate the probability of someone buying on, say, a car versus a plane? Is it simply a number of deaths over a number of rides or time spent in the vehicle?" Great question, Nick. Here's our answer from Ken Kolash, manager of statistics with the National Safety Council.
KEN KOLOSH: There's a couple of different ways to do it, and all the different ways that we use to estimate your risk of injury or death or your odds of dying are on our website, injuryfacts.nsc.org. One of the more popular ways is our odds of dying calculation, which is a really simple calculation, and it's one of the tools the National Safety Council uses to help people better understand and compare the risks that we all face on a daily basis.
The data comes from a couple of different sources. We first look at the number of deaths in any given year, and that data is from the Centers for Disease Control. And they actually count up all the death certificates every year. And we look at the number of deaths by a particular cause, like a car crash or a plane crash or even a dog bite, issues like that.
Then we also take data from the Census Bureau on population and life expectancy, and we bring all that data together to calculate the odds of dying. So in order to calculate the one-year odds of dying, it's the number of deaths divided by the US population, and to calculate lifetime odds, it's the one-year odds divided by your life expectancy. And currently, the average life expectancy is 78.6 years.
But that's a really simple calculation and cannot not take into account your exposure to those risks. Examples of this would be risk of dying in a motorcycle crash. Obviously, your personal risk of dying in a motorcycle crash is dependent on you using a motorcycle. So for other categories of risk like transportation, we're able to better quantify the level of exposure. We know how many miles are being traveled, and also we know average occupancy of different vehicle types. So based on that, we can calculate the number of passenger miles traveled in any given year and then use that as the exposure measure to more accurately compare different modes of transportation.
In other risk categories, calculating the exposure measure is really difficult. Like if we take earthquakes. Although we know that, depending on where you live in the country, you have differing risks associated with earthquakes, it's really difficult, if not impossible, to accurately differentiate your exposure level regarding earthquakes. So when there's a general risk, like earthquakes or dog bites or lightning strikes, we assume everyone more or less has the same level of risk or exposure, while in other categories [INAUDIBLE], like transportation, we're able to take a more nuanced approach and really look at different levels of exposure.
CODY GOUGH: Ken added that these odds are important because the National Safety Council finds that people worry about the wrong things. For example, he was asked to calculate the odds of dying from a shark attack, but they couldn't do it because nobody in the US has died from a shark attack in the last two years. People worry about dying from something like a shark attack or a plane crash, but your actual odds of dying from either of those things are much lower than your odds of dying in a car crash. So stop worrying about dying from a shark attack when you're on vacation and start buckling your seat belt in case of an accident.
Ashley, would you say Chicago is a good city for bike riding?
ASHLEY HAMER: I feel like it doesn't have that reputation, but I like it OK. I haven't really ridden bikes in other cities, so I don't really have a lot of comparison. But there are good number of bike lanes, and we've got some cool bike crossing signals and stuff like that. Well, if you love riding your bike, then we've got the perfect story to wrap up today's show.
The nonprofit PeopleForBikes recently released its list of the best US cities for bikes based on two years of data. They surveyed riders, city staffers, maps, and publicly available data to make a whopping 184 calculations per city. Their rankings include five metrics-- typical bike ridership, public safety measures, how connected the path's are to important areas of the city, how fast the path network is expanding, and how far that network reaches.
You can find the full write-up today on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But here are the top six cities overall. In sixth place, Madison, Wisconsin, with designated safety zones at intersections and bike-specific parking at lots of businesses. Fifth is Tucson, Arizona, with 660 miles of bike lanes on the streets. Fourth, Portland, Oregon, home of Pedalpalooza, the famous annual bike festival.
Third is Boulder, Colorado, with solid safety laws and more than 300 miles of beautiful bike paths. Second was Wausau, Wisconsin, population 39,000, with paths throughout the whole city. And the best city for biking? Fort Collins, Colorado, with special cyclist traffic signals and about 185 miles of bike lanes. Safe riding.
CODY GOUGH: You can read about these stories and more today on curiosity.com. Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
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