Today you’ll learn about how the pandemic has shifted our relationship with time, what a stratospheric aerosol injection entails, and the effects of a certain group of people who are more likely than others to volunteer for psychological research.
Today you’ll learn about how the pandemic has shifted our relationship with time, what a stratospheric aerosol injection entails, and the effects of a certain group of people who are more likely than others to volunteer for psychological research.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/time-relationship-aerosol-injections-psych-participants
Time Relationship
Aerosol Injections
Psych Participants
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[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 how the pandemic has shifted our relationship with time, what a stratospheric aerosol injection entails, and the effects of a certain group of people who are more likely than others to volunteer for psychological research.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Do you ever get the feeling that ever since the pandemic, time doesn’t feel the same as it used to? Sometimes the days blur together, sometimes it feels like a day lasts a week.
CALLI: It feels like just yesterday we were right here in front of these microphones talking about double lung transplants and the history of the lie detector. I honestly have no sense of what time even means anymore.
NATE: First of all, that was last week, that was last week we talked about that. But second of all, there’s a reason for that: an artist named Jenny Odell has released a work titled “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock” where she tries to get to the bottom of why time seems to be slipping away from us in a post-pandemic world, and the conclusion she comes to is that time… is a social construct. And due to the way the pandemic has shifted our sense of a “social reality,” our sense of what time even means has broken - maybe permanently.
CALLI: Okay, so sometimes I’ll be joking and I’ll say something along the lines of, “Time’s not real.” But I’m very curious to know what do you mean by “social construct”?
NATE: The easiest way I can explain this is to have you think about when you ask somebody to do anything. Really? Maybe you're asking a friend if they'll help you move, but they respond with, Oh, sorry, I can't. I don't have time. The truth is, philosophically speaking, we all have that time. Assuming we don't die young, we have years and years of time to offer people. The act of moving will probably take it most a few hours. What Jenny Odell is proposing is that when we say we don't have time, what we mean is we don't have control. For instance, our time might be dictated by a work schedule we have to meet or any kind of anxiety from the world relating to the news, such as a fear of the political climate or of climate change. It can even just be the voice inside our head saying we have to use our time more efficiently. All of those are a result of the world and outside factors like maybe a boss conditioning us, a.k.a. a social construct.
CALLI: But time itself isn’t a social construct - it’s a real thing, especially in a scientific sense.
NATE: Right, and there’s a lot of research supporting the idea that our sense of time WILL revert soon, the further away we get from the era of global lockdowns . Other researchers view the pandemic as a massive global trauma event that will be quite hard to forget anytime soon. Oliver Burkeman, who wrote a book called “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” said that even if our day-to-day lives during the pandemic only changed 5%, that’s a HUGE difference to live through and get used to, for one to three years. And to tie that back to Jenny Odell’s theory that time is a social construct, that also means that the social value of time has become MORE valuable to us - making any “reversion” a tough concept to grasp.
CALLI: Well, let’s just say time is a form of control, then. How do we regain that sense of control? It’s not like we could, or even should, go back to the days of lockdown.
NATE: True. But Odell says that people need to reject a lot of our preconceptions about time in order to regain that control. For example, she talks about how in Indigenous societies, there are a number of alternatives to how a day is even measured that we can’t do in a “clock-based” society. Ancient Amazonian cultures relied on solar movements to measure time, rather than a relatively arbitrary 24 hour cycle. Researching this taught Odell to view the concept of those hours as something she used for societal purposes, and not necessarily for herself.
CALLI: This is interesting from a philosophical point of view. I think I’m having a bit of trouble connecting to this because these are the theories of an artist, so I’m not sure what the scientific relevance is.
NATE: The relevance is because her concepts all tie directly into another experiment that popped up recently known as the Blursday database, which is a compilation of work from 32 researchers who looked into the concept of how time is being experienced both during and after the height of the pandemic. The Blursday database is intended to be an objective look at SUBJECTIVE time, as it was experienced by nearly 3,000 people across nine different countries. Each participant was sent 14 questionnaires and 15 different behavioral task lists to perform at home to figure out an answer to the question of whether we’re experiencing time differently.
CALLI: Huh. And what did the Blursday database find?
NATE: If people didn’t feel isolated during lockdown, past, present, and future felt the same as they used to. But if they DID feel isolated, time began to drag. For example, think about how much of your day might be spent commuting if you live in a suburb outside of a major city. One study said that the average US citizen’s daily commute is about an hour: thirty minutes to work, thirty minutes home. Couple that with however long it takes you to shower, get dressed, pack up, and hit the road… and then disregard ALL OF THAT. Because during the pandemic, all of that time spent just getting to work was replaced by turning on a computer and getting to work.
CALLI: When you put it that way, it’s a little disorienting. So is time a form of control? I don’t know.
NATE: And whether it is or isn’t, that’s okay. The truth is, we don’t know where society is going to go next as we all collectively return back to a sense of normalcy. Some of the Blursday researchers believe that the collective trauma we experienced is something that “can’t be self-helped away,” but also believe that there’s a sort of comfort to be found in the idea that we honestly have more time than we believed. The pandemic functioned as a sort of reminder that breaking our routines from time to time CAN signify that we need to cherish the time we have.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Good news: we’ve figured out a way to fight climate change and permanently cool the planet’s climate for good. But there’s also bad news: that better climate might actually destroy entire portions of the world in the process.
NATE: I’ve never been more torn by the good news/bad news dichotomy as I am right now. Obviously I want a better climate, but I also don’t want the world to tear itself apart. What’s the proposed solution?
CALLI: It’s called stratospheric aerosol injection - it’s when we shoot chemicals into the planet’s atmosphere to cool down the climate manually. The chemicals are a collection of tiny reflective particles that, when banded together, will actually reflect sunlight back into space. This method, which is also known as “geoengineering,” can be done with everything from high altitude planes to tethered balloons, and it would only need to be done every one to two years. Based on a number of tests conducted in various parts of the world, the researchers proposing this method strongly suggest that after a while, this would actually reverse climate change by cooling the globe to a sustainable level.
NATE: That seems too simple of a solution. Almost like putting a band-aid on a bullet hole.
CALLI: Whether it’s too simple or not, it’s definitely controversial. On one hand, in 2023, the U.N. Environment Programme called for more research on the topic of geoengineering, and the year before that, the Biden Administration began their own study on the subject. Meanwhile, the topic has basically ripped the science community in half: on one side, you have the people who point to the evidence that geoengineering CAN work. But on the other hand, you have people who say the risks FAR outweigh the rewards here.
NATE: What kind of risks are we talking about?
CALLI: First, there’s the immediate effect of stratospheric aerosol injection affecting the world’s rainfall levels. It might reduce rain in some places, which could lead to a loss of crops and even fresh water. But there’s also a “bigger picture” effect in that geoengineering isn’t currently supported by any one community. One study gives us a hypothetical situation where wealthy entrepreneurs could get their hands on the technology to pick and choose where the climate gets fixed. Say for instance, to save their coastal properties from being hit by a rising ocean.
NATE: That would be disastrous though. If you mess with the tides in certain areas wouldn’t that put places at risk for monsoons?
CALLI: Yep. Specifically Southeast Asia. But even if it’s not the wealthy, who’s to say this doesn’t become our next “global arms race” - aka a type of technology nations fight over in order to control the world’s weather? It sounds like the plot to a DC Comics movie, but it’s likely. Almost as likely as the possibility that if nations around the world committed to geoengineering, they might take that as an invitation to abandon cutting fossil fuel emissions, which could ultimately be devastating for the world regardless of any negating effect geoengineering could have.
NATE: I’m really surprised this has become popular enough to make it up the chain to multiple governments. This sounds a little pseudo-scientific, if I’m being honest.
CALLI: It was considered pseudoscience for a looooong time. But as the years have gone on, a number of research papers and academic books have popularized geoengineering as the climate gets worse and worse. People like Bill Gates began donating to research projects to figure out the benefits of geoengineering, to the point that by 2021, organizations such as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have actually switched gears and now tell scientists to “cautiously pursue” this sort of study.
NATE: Do people advocating for geoengineering think this is the best solution?
CALLI: Most don’t, actually. Like you said, this is a band-aid on a bullet hole, and that’s kinda how everyone feels. Even the most hardcore supporters of geoengineering know this is just one of many needed solutions. Plus, there is a consensus among its supporters that before anything happens in the world of stratospheric aerosol injection, there has to be an agreement between all nations in the world on how to fairly distribute such chemicals. Unfortunately, that kind of morality might not end up mattering: a company called Make Sunsets, who are a geoengineering startup group, already began doing SAI test flights on their own. Many scientists took this as a grim sign that we need to figure out geoengineering fast - or else, some kind of bad actor will figure it out first.
NATE: This company made chemtrails real?! Uh, ok, what’s our takeaway here then?
CALLI: Takeaway is geoengineering is a very complicated topic, and there’s not really a consensus on if it’s going to do more harm than good or vice versa. One of the anti-geoengineering researchers says that being optimistic about the world’s ability to play nice and agree on how geoengineering should be implemented is foolish. He calls it “Captain Kirk syndrome,” in honor of the main character of the show Star Trek. The researcher thinks that there’s this expectation that there will be one assertive leader who knows how to take action, consult with the scientists, and do the right thing all the time. But as he says at the end of the study, and this is a little sad but, “Captain Kirk is not real life. There is no Captain Kirk.”
NATE: Well not yet, he’s not born until the year 2233.
CALLI: You have a point.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: So many of our segments are about studies. Well, researchers at the University of Warsaw in Poland, conducted their own study, about studies and have run into a bit of a problem. Turns out that people with personality disorders are more likely to volunteer for psychological studies. And that could be a huge problem - and even exposes what could be a much deeper issue for previous studies.
CALLI: But aren’t they the exact people psychologists should be studying?
NATE: That kinda depends on what questions you’re trying to answer. So, to make sense of this, let’s talk a little bit about scientific studies. Let’s say you want to find out the global average of carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere. Taking samples from the air around Chicago will tell you how much CO2 there is around Chicago, but it won’t tell you anything about the rest of the world.
CALLI: Right. You need a random sample.
NATE: Yep. The bigger the better. Get a bunch of samples from randomized spots around the globe, and then average them together. This might be oversimplifying it a bit, but if you only take samples from air around an oil refinery, you might get a bit of a shock.
CALLI: Yeah - the CO2 level will be higher than the average. So back to psychological studies - if most of the volunteers express some form of personality disorder, you aren’t getting a random sample.
NATE: Bingo. Researchers at the University of Warsaw in Poland wanted to understand what drove people to volunteer for studies, and what they found opened up a real can of worms. They conducted several of their own studies of nearly 950 people - some who had previously participated in psychological studies and some who hadn’t. They found that those who had previously volunteered were more likely to exhibit symptoms of personality disorders.
CALLI: Why is that?
NATE: They aren’t totally sure. It’s possible that taking part in a study might seem like a cheap way to get help. Or it could be that those who suffer from personality disorders are just more interested in this kind of research. But the thing is, most - if not all - psychological studies depend on subjects to self-select. And what’s worse - so many of these studies take place on college campuses using college students.
CALLI: Okay and that’s like sampling the air over a refinery.
NATE: And that leads to a problem with something researchers call ‘generalisability.’
CALLI: Gesundheit.
NATE: If a study is highly generalizable, it basically means that the results can relate to the general population, and not just your test sample. But if your study draws from a very specific slice of the population, well…
CALLI: …it’s harder to draw conclusions about the rest of us.
NATE: Yeah. And that leads to yet another problem: the replication crisis. This happens when the results of a study are so specific to the study subjects that they can’t be replicated in other studies.
CALLI: And if you can’t replicate results, the results probably aren’t accurate.
NATE: Which means that so many of the ‘groundbreaking’ studies we hear about in psychology might not be so groundbreaking after all.
CALLI: Oh my gosh, okay. So how do we fix this?
NATE: The first step is just understanding that this problem exists. Researchers can try to design studies that aren’t influenced by the personality of the participant. And, at minimum, they need to figure out a way to attract a broader, more representative group of participants to their studies. But it’s also important to remember that human behavior is an especially tough thing to generalize, which makes designing studies really difficult.
CALLI: It’s not rocket science.
NATE: Literally! Rocket science might actually be easier to study!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. An artist has released a theory that the pandemic is proof that time is a form of social control, and by removing the social aspects of our lives such as in-person work or meeting with friends, it exposes the ways in which certain social factors make us lose control as individuals. It’s not clear if we’re reverting back to how things were pre-pandemic entirely, but one thing’s for sure: the days do feel a lot longer than they used to with this knowledge in mind.
CALLI: It’s called stratospheric aerosol injection and it could reverse climate change. OR, it might create devastating monsoons that could destroy huge parts of the world. Which one’s correct? Right now, science is pointing towards both in one of the most complicated debates happening in the scientific community. SAI is an example of geoengineering, a controversial scientific study of reshaping the world to make it better that was once considered a pseudoscience. However, this former pseudoscience has seem legitimization in the form of grants from the United Nations and the US government, leading some to question if we should try to stop geoengineering - or find a way to make it potentially less devastating.
NATE: A study suggests that people who volunteer for psychological studies might be more likely to exhibit symptoms of a personality disorder. These findings could change the way psychologists design studies and solicit volunteers, and throws into question results from previous studies.