Today we discuss the psychological effects of listening to podcasts, how climate change actually makes us more likely to engage in hate speech, and how giving plants alcohol in the form of ethanol can make them resistant to drought.
Today we discuss the psychological effects of listening to podcasts, how climate change actually makes us more likely to engage in hate speech, and how giving plants alcohol in the form of ethanol can make them resistant to drought.
Podcast Friends
Drunk Plants
Hot Temper
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/podcast-friends-drunk-plants-hot-temper
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today you’ll learn about the positive psychological effects of listening to podcasts, how climate change actually makes us more likely to engage in hate speech, and how giving plants alcohol in the form of ethanol can make them resistant to drought.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Great news, Calli. We are actually making people's lives better by doing this podcast. Turns out there is a link between listening to podcasts and having a greater sense of purpose in your life.
CALLI: Okay. Well, I am immediately intrigued and happy because that means that we might be helping people. What is this link?
NATE: It turns out it all boils down to Parasocial relationships. Parasocial relationships are the one sided relationships a listener has with their favorite artists, like musicians or authors, movie stars or even, yes, us podcast hosts. Now, podcast hosts don't usually know their listeners well, but listeners feel like they know the hosts well, and that feeling of relatedness helps people feel smarter, funnier, and more focused than people who don't consume podcasts.
CALLI: I feel like I understand that, but I don't understand how this would be measured. Can you shed some light on that?
NATE: Yeah. So this is measured through a study conducted by Stephanie J. Tobin and Rosanna E Guadagno who wanted to figure out more about the kinds of people who listen to podcasts, how they listen to them and why they listen. It turns out there is a wealth of research available on social media use, but very little so far on podcasts. So they sent out an online questionnaire to 308 adults from various parts of the world, including the UK, the United States and Portugal. And they had a bunch of questions that ranged from things like: How much do you feel you need to belong to? How much do you enjoy thinking about things? And of course, they also asked, Do you ever listen to podcasts?
CALLI: Okay, good questions. Make sense. What were the results?
NATE: 78% of the respondents said that they had listened to podcasts, and all of them claimed to have been listening to podcasts for an average of 3.5 hours per week for three years. And that opened them up to a new set of questions about their listening habits. Questions like: How satisfied does a podcast make you feel or are you susceptible to smartphone addiction? And from here, Tobin and Guadagno were able to examine which personality traits predicted. Podcast listening.
CALLI: Okay, so they worked backwards to figure out which traits crossed over?
NATE: Exactly. And when they looked at each predictor separately, they found that participants with higher openness to experience and Internet based curiosity and a need for cognition were much more likely to have listened to a podcast. And this means that people who listen to podcasts have higher informational needs. So podcast listening allows them to explore new topics and engage in critical thinking.
CALLI: What about the difference between a first time listener or somebody who's new to a podcast or somebody who's a regular listener to a show? Is Is there a difference?
NATE: Surprisingly, they didn't find any link, which was actually a huge surprise to them. The number of hours per week spent listening to podcasts was not linked to any psychological needs like autonomy, competence or relatedness. It wasn't even related to any of the questions about meaning, mindfulness, or smartphone addiction. But it turns out that listening to more than one podcast per month was related to having a greater presence of meaning in life, especially if the participant was found to have developed a parasocial relationship with their favorite hosts. And this was especially tied to a higher level of relatedness.
CALLI: Okay, so I understand the word relatedness, but not really in this context. Can you flesh this out for me?
NATE: Relatedness is the basic psychological need for social connection and belonging. So to put it simply, these listeners felt like they had found community.
CALLI: Okay, I love this. This is heart warming. So are you saying that everybody who listens to Curiosity daily is a happier, more well-adjusted individual?
NATE: Yes, 100% conclusively true.
CALLI: Yes. Good. Love it.
NATE: Okay. No, I'm not saying that in a perfect world. Yeah, but the study does have a few limitations. It was cross-sectional, which means it's not possible to draw any causal conclusions from the data. As well, participants might not have been entirely accurate in reporting their podcast listening habits. This was a self-reporting study, which is notoriously one of the most unreliable methods to conduct a study. Tobin and Guadagno suggest that any future diary studies should offer a more accurate picture of participants podcast listening behaviors within shorter time frames. Plus, Tobin admits that there are a lot of unknown qualities in this study.
CALLI: Okay. Like what?
NATE: Well, like how some different kinds of podcasts might provide different gratifications. Some podcasts seem more relational with likable hosts covering different stories every time. You know my favorite kind. Some are more goal oriented, like true crime investigation shows. She wants to know what each kind of show provides a listener which future studies might unearth for us.
CALLI: Okay, I love this, but hopefully her next study carves out a little bit of time to study the specifics of a certain little conversational science show.
NATE: Good idea.
CALLI: Can we get a hold of her?
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Whether you drink alcohol or not, all of our plants might soon rely on drinking to grow big and strong.
CALLI: Okay, so wait, plants are now drinking alcohol. What made anybody even think to try that like this is sounding like maybe there was a college frat party and a beer keg spilled on the lawn.
NATE: Well, though, it's a new study shows that giving our plants ethanol, not beer, makes them more resilient to our world's changing climate. So plants produce ethanol when they can't get any water. And researchers wondered if giving them ethanol would help them become more drought resistant. Resiliency is a big concern because we know climate change is going to bring real challenges to growing crops like corn, wheat and rice by 2030, including big droughts.
CALLI: Okay, but why are we bothering with giving them booze? I mean, shouldn't we be working on, like, genetically modified crops or something to make them more resilient?
NATE: Sure. Researchers have tried genetically modifying plants. They've made the pores on plants’ leaves, called stomata, stay closed longer, so they release less water vapor. They've also tried to get plants to grow larger root systems so they can collect more water from the same amount of rainfall. But these solutions are expensive. They're complicated and are hardest to come by in the areas where they are needed the most. Especially poorer countries with a high likelihood of drought. Ethanol offers a potential clever and affordable solution.
CALLI: Okay, so I'm a little bit confused as to what ethanol actually is. Is it more like a beer or a wine? Are we talking about something closer to like a vodka or heavy liquor?
NATE: It's definitely closer to liquor. This is pure ethanol, so a small amount of it is equivalent to a few alcoholic beverages as we understand them. Just a little bit of ethanol can make humans queazy, drunk, and make you vomit. In large quantities, it can knock you unconscious super fast. And plants seem to love this stuff.
CALLI: Okay, so just giving like corn plants a tumbler of ethanol on the rocks, or did they have a more standard study?
NATE: No, this was a real study. So researchers in Japan took rice and wheat plants and grew them for about two weeks with plenty of water. Then they took half the plants and treated the soil around them with ethanol for about three days. Then they didn't water either set of plants for two weeks.
CALLI: Okay, for two weeks?! So I have or I should say, had the house plants and leaving them alone for two weeks. I can just tell you, you know, from experience, that's a death sentence.
NATE: Well, for the plants that didn't get any ethanol, that was pretty true. After two weeks when they started watering all the plants again, only 5% of the untreated plants survived and sprung back up.
CALLI: All right. And the treated plants?
NATE: Get this: 75% of those plants survived.
CALLI: Holy crap! Okay, so that's a massive change. Do the researchers know why this happened?
NATE: Well, they wanted to be sure they did know what was going on. So they tracked the gene expression of all the plants during the study to see what genes the plants used and what processes the plants put energy into. What's so interesting is that the plants that had the ethanol treatment started expressing genes that usually turn on during drought, even before the researchers stopped giving them plenty of water.
CALLI: So even while it had plenty of water, it was acting like it was in a drought.
NATE: Exactly. The researchers say it was like they had a head start for the drought. They had already naturally started closing their stomata, those leaf pores, to conserve water.
CALLI: All right. Was it only the stomata or did other things change?
NATE: They say the treated plants were able to use the ethanol to make sugars so they could do photosynthesis all without any water. Adding the ethanol made them wildly more productive and resilient to water shortages.
CALLI: This actually really sounds like really good news. We are facing a future with a lot less water and a lot more people, so feeding them is going to be a big deal.
NATE: Absolutely. And thanks to these researchers, we now know we have a safe, effective and importantly, cheap way to keep our crops growing.
CALLI: And. Maybe a better way to keep my windowsill plants alive.
NATE: You might need to go grab some Everclear.
CALLI: I'm going to try it.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: All right. Did you know that climate change might actually be affecting how nice we are to each other online?
NATE: So it's not just making sea temperatures rise. It's making our blood boil, too.
CALLI: Okay, that was awful. Are you proud of yourself for that one? Yeah. Okay. So researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research recently found that extremely hot or cold temperatures make people more aggressive and irritable online. They're more likely to use hate speech. This raises a lot of questions about how we might emotionally react to change in climate instead of the usual talking points about how we might physically adapt.
NATE: Alright, that’s pretty interesting. How did they look into this? They just check out the subreddits of cities going through heat spells.
CALLI: Actually, they used Twitter. They used A.I. to analyze 4 billion tweets from 2014 to 2020. They used the U.N. definition for hate speech, which is discriminatory language that targets things like your race, religion or nationality.
NATE: All right. That sounds like it'd take a good amount of work. What did they do when people used the mean words? But in kind of like a nice way, like how I called my best friend an insert benign insult here.
CALLI: Okay, well, it definitely took some time to train the A.I. to notice those nuances, but often the tweets had enough context that it could figure out what the tweeters really meant.
NATE: So you have the tweets. How do they get the temperature information for when and where the tweets all came from?
CALLI: The researchers looked at geotagged tweets from in the U.S. and combine that with the weather data from these areas.
NATE: So what exactly qualifies as extremely hot or cold temperatures?
CALLI: So according to the researchers, a comfortable temperature is anything between 54 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. I strongly disagree. That sounds way too cold.
NATE: We both like things a little warmer than that.
CALLI: It's fair. It's fair. But that is what they were looking at. So 54 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers looked at the tweets coming from places above or below these temperatures. When they analyzed the 4 billion tweets, they found 75 million or about 2% that qualified as hate tweets. And they found that both the total number and percentage of hate tweets increased in those uncomfortable, too hot or too cold temperatures.
NATE: Interesting. So what made more of a difference? Too hot or too cold?
CALLI: When the temperatures were too cold, hate tweets went up about 12%. But when temperatures got too hot. Hate tweets went up 22%.
NATE: I think that that makes a lot of sense in my mind, honestly, because, like, if it's cold, I'm miserable. But it's like an internal misery. But when it's too hot, I can get irritable. But like, that's a projected irritability. So they have the hard data. But my internal thinking goes along with that. So these people in these two hot areas like go inside and don't get so mad. Go where you've got AC and cool off literally and figuratively. Seems pretty simple.
CALLI: You would think so. Yeah. But here's the big thing. Not everybody has AC, so comfort in extreme weather depends a lot on your financial position. But even more interestingly, when temperature went above 86 degrees Fahrenheit, heat increase across all incomes, areas in the country, religious beliefs and preferences.
NATE: So if it gets too hot, no matter what, everyone is likely to be a bit angrier.
CALLI: Exactly. And to be clear, not just angrier, but more bigoted. That has some big implications. We already know that being a target of hate speech online can be really bad for your mental health, especially in younger people. And the amount of hate speech we see also gives us a pretty good idea of how likely hate crimes are to occur in that area.
NATE: It's not just our planet suffering. When the temperatures rise, we suffer directly as well.
CALLI: Right. We are technically adaptable, but just not that adaptable to extreme temperatures. We’re, we're humans. We're squishy. There's a limit to what we can take, even if our bodies can, you know, quote unquote, survive. This finding adds a whole new understanding of the social and societal impact of a warming planet.
NATE: Well, we need to get things under control if we don't want to be at each other's throats.
CALLI: Exactly. Fighting to protect our planet, it turns out, is actually another fight to protect our own mental health and safety online.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. You’re listening to Curiosity Daily, and it might just be making your life more meaningful. A new study reveals that people who regularly listen to podcasts are more likely to have a greater sense of purpose in their lives, especially if they form parasocial relationships with the hosts. No word yet on if this applies to Curiosity Daily, but since we have the greatest fans on Earth, we’re sure each and every one of you has the most fulfilling life ever!
CALLI: Bartender, one for me and my plant friend. Researchers recently found that giving plants ethanol alcohol makes them more resilient to drought! This could be a massive, and affordable, solution for future climate and population challenges.
NATE: A new study found that rising temperatures don't just melt polar ice, they cause social meltdowns too. Rising temperatures make us more likely to use hate speech, and could have a big impact on our mental and societal health.