Learn about why selfish people have false memories of being generous; why we can’t do brain transplants; and why you used to be able to buy life insurance from airport vending machines.
Learn about why selfish people have false memories of being generous; why we can’t do brain transplants; and why you used to be able to buy life insurance from airport vending machines.
Selfish people actually have false memories of being generous by Kelsey Donk
Listener Question: Why can’t we do brain transplants? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Zoe)
You used to be able to buy life insurance policies in airport vending machines by Steffie Drucker
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/selfish-people-remember-being-generous-why-we-cant-transplant-brains-and-buying-life-insurance-from-vending-machines
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 selfish people have false memories; and we’ll answer a listener question about why we can’t do brain transplants. You’ll also learn about why you used to be able to buy life insurance from vending machines.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
When selfish people do selfish things, how do they face themselves in the morning? That’s what researchers from Yale and the University of Zurich wanted to know, so they put selfish behavior to the test. As it turns out, selfish people actually have false memories of being generous.
We’ve known for a long time that people make themselves feel ok about acting in less-than-ok ways through something called ‘motivated reasoning.’ We convince ourselves that we deserve to do what we do and if anyone was hurt in the process, well, they deserved that too. Like, you cut that guy off in traffic because you’re in a hurry to get somewhere, and he shouldn’t have been driving so fast anyway. That kind of thing.
But the researchers wondered if it was possible that memory had more of a role. Maybe people don’t need to do mental gymnastics to appear generous. They just remember themselves as more generous than they really are.
Here’s how that would work. Say a customer leaves a bad tip for a server at a restaurant. If the customer engaged in motivated reasoning, they might convince themselves that the server didn’t do enough to deserve a big tip. In the memory theory, that scenario would play out differently. Instead of deciding who deserved what, the customer would just remember leaving a bigger tip than they actually did.
The research team decided to try this theory out in a lab. They started by giving people a pot of money and telling them to decide how much to keep for themselves and how much to give to strangers. Then, after some time passed, the participants had to recall how much money they’d given to the strangers.
The team found that their memory theory was right. The most selfish participants misremembered their own behavior and believed they gave more money to the strangers than they actually did. That was even true in a case where participants got extra money if they remembered their actions accurately.
The good news? Most of the participants acted generously and remembered their actions accurately. These findings only applied to the most selfish participants.
The study has an important lesson for us. Most people are generous, and try to behave in moral ways. But sometimes, we fall short of our expectations for ourselves. It turns out that our brains can just rewrite history to help us see ourselves as moral people anyway.
We got a listener question from Zoe, who writes, “If they can do heart and lung transplants, how come they haven't figured out how to do brain transplants?” Great question, Zoe!
The first successful organ transplant was a kidney, way back in 1954, and we’ve only gotten better since then. But some organs are still trickier to transplant than others. When a surgeon transplants a heart or a kidney, all you really need is to reconnect the blood vessels for the organ to start working inside its new body. But for things like hand or foot transplants, it’s not so simple. You’ve got to attach bones, tendons, and most importantly, nerves. Nerves take longer to heal than other tissues, and sometimes they heal wrong or don’t heal at all. And considering the fact that the brain is connected to the body by one big nerve superhighway known as the spinal cord, that’s where the problem starts.
It’s not just that we haven’t been able to do a brain transplant; we haven’t been able to fully repair a severed spinal cord, or even a badly damaged one. That’s why spinal cord injuries can be so devastating. It’s also why every story about a quote-unquote “successful” head transplant ends up having some giant caveats: in 1970, an American surgeon “successfully” transplanted a monkey’s head onto another monkey’s body, but the monkey was paralyzed from the neck down and only lived for nine days. And in 2015, an Italian neurosurgeon claimed to have performed the first “successful” human head transplant — but the humans weren’t alive, so who knows if it would have worked for a living patient.
There are other problems, too. Transplants always come with the possibility that the recipient’s immune system will attack the organ as a foreign invader, which is why these patients need to take immunosuppressive drugs. We don’t know a whole lot about the immune system when it comes to the brain, so the risks of rejection there could be even higher. Plus, there’s a lot of danger involved in removing a brain from its oxygen supply, since that can kill brain cells. A transplanted brain isn’t much good if it doesn’t work anymore.
There’s also the fact that your brain develops in tune with your body — no one else’s. It not only has your memories, it also has the precise map of your limbs and knows just how to balance them on narrow walkways. It’s possible that putting a brain in a new body would be like, to borrow a description from neuroscientist Dean Burnett, quote “trying to play an Xbox game on a Playstation.” end quote. In the end, even if you could transplant a living brain, there’s no knowing how it would interact with a new body. I, for one, am not gonna volunteer to find out. Thanks for your question, Zoe! If you have a question, email it to podcast at curiosity dot com or leave us a voicemail at 312 596 3208. [CODY: Though they have adaptors for that]
CODY: Today’s episode is sponsored by KiwiCo.
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What did you do the last time you arrived at the airport for a flight? Maybe you focused on getting through security; maybe you looked for a place to charge your phone. And of course, maybe stopping by a vending machine. But I’m gonna guess you went to that vending machine to get some snacks, NOT to get… a life insurance policy.
Well believe it or not, that was a thing you could do back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. You know: pick up a life insurance policy from a vending machine, just like a bottle of pop! NBD. Yes, travelers could purchase instant coverage for up to $63,000 for just 2 dollars and 50 cents in quarters (which today would be about 21 bucks). That money would be paid out to any chosen beneficiaries in the case of the purchaser’s death during the flight. And this isn’t just some obscure oddity in certain airports; it was actually a pretty popular purchase. One company in 1963 sold nearly $85 billion worth of insurance — today that’s more than $713 billion.
Flight insurance was controversial, too. Coverage was specific to the flight for which passengers purchased the policy, so they’d have to buy a new plan for a new flight except if they’d bought a round-trip ticket. The chances of being seriously hurt or killed in a plane crash were extremely low, and many passengers likely already had coverage from conventional life insurance policies. A spokesperson for one insurance company acknowledged that for many it was “an emotional purchase” that provided “extra peace of mind.”
Now, any true crime buff knows that people go to great lengths to collect insurance payouts. There were at least four cases of what we’d now consider domestic terrorism stemming from flight insurance fraud. In 1955, a Denver businesswoman’s son hid explosives in her luggage, killing her, 38 other passengers, and five crewmembers. He stood to gain $37,000 upon his mother’s death from her airline insurance alone. That’s more than $316,000 today.
This crime led Colorado to outlaw insurance vending machines in airports, but that was the only formal ban ever put in place. The machines did eventually fade from North American airports, but for a reason you might not expect: air travel had built such a solid reputation for safety that people didn’t feel they needed flight insurance anymore.
You can still find insurance vending machines today in Japan and Taiwan, and they’ve recently made a comeback in the UK. Today, that last-minute peace-of-mind purchase is insurance that covers illness or bad weather. Coverage for a global pandemic is a whole other story.
Leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208!
CODY: It’s about time we put our seatbacks and tray tables in the upright position and review what we’ve learned today. But first, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Next week, you’ll learn about why “common sense” isn’t a real thing;
The surprising way Japanese honeybees defend themselves against “murder hornets”;
Why llamas are so promising for human virus protection
And more!
CODY: You’ll also hear renowned climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe explain how we know climate change is caused by humans; and researchers Elizabeth Sawchuck and Mary Prendergast will DIG IN to how new technology is changing archaeology. Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Ashley Hamer, and Steffie Drucker, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend, and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!