Learn about a personality trait called the D Factor that might be behind all the evil in the world; why the Pluto planet debate just won’t go away; and how much time it takes to grow giant, prize-worthy pumpkins. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: The D Factor Might Be the Personality Trait Behind All the Evil in the World Here's Why the Pluto Planet Debate Just Won't Die Here's How Time-Consuming It Is to Grow Giant, Prize-Worthy Pumpkins Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn about a personality trait called the D Factor that might be behind all the evil in the world; why the Pluto planet debate just won’t go away; and how much time it takes to grow giant, prize-worthy pumpkins.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron!
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-sinister-darkness-factor-trait-why-plutos-definition-matters-and-world-record-pumpkins
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiositydotcom 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 about a personality trait that might be behind all the evil in the world, why the Pluto planet debate just won't go away, and how much time it takes to grow giant prize-worthy pumpkins.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. A new study published this month in psychological review may have figured out the personality trait behind all the evil in the world. Even better, you can take a test to see how much of it you've got just in time for Halloween.
ASHLEY HAMER: Bwa ha ha ha. Is that good?
CODY GOUGH: I don't think you would score very high on this.
ASHLEY HAMER: Just saying it.
CODY GOUGH: Got to practice that evil laugh.
ASHLEY HAMER: I really do.
CODY GOUGH: You know, like Dr. Horrible. It takes some rehearsing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: These evil personality traits go beyond what psychologists call the dark triad. We've talked about that before on curiositydotcom. The dark triad is made up of machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. The researchers behind this new study set out to describe how the darkest personality traits were related. So to do that, they expanded their search and found a full set of nine dark traits that could be linked together.
Here's a quick rundown starting with the dark triad. Machiavellianism is a manipulative attitude, narcissism is a self-absorbed sense of superiority, and psychopathy is a lack of empathy and self-control. Beyond that, there's egoism. That's an obsession with gaining an advantage at the expense of others.
A similar trait is self interest, which is a drive to draw attention to your high status. Do you do this too much with the award-winning thing? Then there's sadism and spiteful which both stem from a drive to harm others. With sadism, you hurt people for your pleasure or gain, and with spitefulness, you inflict pain regardless of the harming duty yourself.
The eighth straight is psychological entitlement, which is the persistent belief that you deserve more than other people. And finally, moral disengagement is the general ability to detach from your conscience and behave unethically without feeling distressed. The researchers figured out what ties these all together Over the course of four studies where 2,500 participants took personality tests.
Researchers ran a statistical analysis and found so much overlap that it suggested a single core trait behind them all. They call it, the D-factor. D is for dark. This was inspired by a similar discovery that pinpointed general intelligence that was called the g factor. Researchers came up with the g factor more than 100 years ago when they noticed that people who performed well on certain types of cognitive tests were likely to perform well on others.
So both the g and the D factors are psychological constructs that help us better understand how these specific features relate to more general ones. And guess what? You can still participate in this study at darkfactor.org. You can determine your dark factor by responding to a number of statements. And there are a few different versions depending on how much time you want to spend, from about 5 to 20 minutes. Go see how dark you really are. One more time, that's darkfactor.org.
ASHLEY HAMER: Pluto, man. Just Pluto. What are we going to do with you? Are you a moon? Are you a planet? Are you a dwarf?
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know what you are. Why can't anybody seem to agree what you are? Today, we're in a deep dive into the Pluto debate. Because believe it or not, the fate of our solar system's classification is at stake. It's a big deal, Cody.
CODY GOUGH: I could tell.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, so in 2006, the International Astronomical Union said that Pluto can't be a planet because it's too small to clear debris near its path in space. OK, but wait a minute. Even Earth can't clear all the little rocks in its orbit. This is why a lot of people were pretty upset with the decision.
And a new paper in the journal Icarus makes the situation look even worse. So here's the idea. If we're talking about how to define a planet, we should look at the literature of scientific papers to see what other scientists said. This is really important because literature is a part of how science works.
A scientist makes a discovery, they submit it to a scientific journal, and then other scientists actually review their work before it gets published. The peer-review process has been fundamental to science for hundreds of years. Well, here's the shocker in this new paper. It reviewed literature about planets all the way back to 1802. You know, before electricity had even been invented.
Remember how the IAU said Pluto couldn't be a planet because it was too small to clear debris in its orbit, well, out of all of the literature in this 200 plus year review, only one single paper said that a planet needs to clear its orbit. And get this. That methodology was later discredited.
CODY GOUGH: What?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: How is this even a thing?
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. The new paper's lead investigator is convinced we need to think differently about Pluto, especially, after NASA's New Horizons spacecraft showed an incredibly complex world during its flyby in 2015. Based on that data, Pluto could have an underground ocean, ancient lakes, and even organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life, people. It could be more dynamic and alive than Mars, and it could have more complex geology than any other planet besides Earth.
Anyway, I could go on all day about this but there are plenty of other arguments worth considering that you can read about in our full write up on curiositydotcom and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. Just remember that this debate is far from over. And in the end, what scientists decide could have huge implications.
I mean, we might end up with a definition that leaves us with more than 100 planets in our solar system. Whatever happens, just be glad you didn't have to memorize that many when you were in elementary school.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. That's going to be quite the saying, "My Very Earnest Mother Just--"
ASHLEY HAMER: It just going to be a book. You're just going to recite a book.
CODY GOUGH: We want to give a special shout out to some of our patrons for supporting our show. Thank you Carrie Greenwald, Dane Norris, and Emily for contributing to our Patreon page. And thanks Emily for the really sweet message you left on our Patreon page last week. We are so happy you're enjoying our show.
ASHLEY HAMER: If you're listening and you want to support Curiosity Daily, then visit Patreon.com/curiositydotcom, all spelled out. The more patrons we get, the more quality stuff we can do for you. Feel free to chip in just a fraction of your Netflix subscription. Come on. You know we're more entertaining than the new season of that one show that totally jumped the shark in 2018.
And we're offering our patrons lots of cool rewards like exclusive full length bonus podcast episodes featuring interviews with experts like we used to do on the show. One more time, that's Patreon.com/curiositydotcom.
CODY GOUGH: Today we're wrapping up with pumpkins by the numbers. If you've ever thought about growing a world record pumpkin, then you might want to think again after you hear how much work you have to put in. It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
ASHLEY HAMER: The greatest compliment anyone has ever given me was a boy in school when we were all watching It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown in band class. He said that I reminded him the Little Red-Haired Girl. Which is like the best character.
CODY GOUGH: Peppermint Patty?
ASHLEY HAMER: No. The Little Red-Haired Girl is the one that everybody has a crush on.
CODY GOUGH: Peppermint Patty?
ASHLEY HAMER: No. Her name is Little Red-Haired Girl. It's the one that-- you don't even Charlie Brown Cannon, Cody?
CODY GOUGH: I don't know--
ASHLEY HAMER: Think Charlie Brown boy.
CODY GOUGH: Who's The Little Read-Haired Girl?
ASHLEY HAMER: It's just a nameless character.
CODY GOUGH: Little Red-Haired Girl. I'm googling that. What? What is she in?
ASHLEY HAMER: She's just the one that Charlie Brown talks about. You can can just imagine her personality because she doesn't really do anything. Maybe this wasn't a great compliment but--
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: The Wikipedia page says The Little Red-Haired Girl is an unseen character in the Peanuts comic strip.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. So she can't like disappoint you.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: Was your friend saying you're imaginary?
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't know.
CODY GOUGH: Is this like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl kind of thin?
ASHLEY HAMER: I think it might have been. Never mind. It wasn't the best compliment. I take it back.
CODY GOUGH: Remind me to give you more compliments so that no longer reigns supreme. Whether that's your favorite Peanuts character or not, everyone loves a good jack-o'-lantern. But not all pumpkins are the size of a human head or two. In 2016, the world record for the heaviest pumpkin measured a borderline disturbing 2,624.6 pounds. That's the weight of a 2017 Mini Cooper. And giant pumpkins aren't going to get smaller.
The world's record pumpkin in 1981, less than 40 years ago, was just 493 and 1/2 pounds. That means the weight record more than quadrupled in just a few decades. But these pumpkins don't grow themselves. Don Young is an amateur pumpkin grower who was profiled by The New York Times in 2011.
He said he spends $8,000 a year on his passion project. Possibly worse than that, Young says he wakes up in the middle of the night to check his pumpkins. He also uses 80 sprinkler heads that pump out 27,000 gallons of water a month. That's almost enough to supply a family of four for a year.
He runs heat lamps all night after he plants the seeds in the cold ground in April and he would cool his gorge with fans in sweltering midsummer heat. He also can't remember the last time he took a vacation. Look, let me put it this way. On top of all the time, money, and energy you have to put into it, the world's biggest pumpkins are carefully genetically engineered and selectively bred for optimal size.
You want to set a world record? Go right ahead. But the trick to doing it is definitely no treat.
ASHLEY HAMER: Read about today's stories and more on curiositydotcom.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow with the award-winning Curiosity Daily, and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer, stay curious.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.