Learn about why February only has 28 days; why early birds and night owls aren’t the only two chronotypes; and why the anchoring effect says you should always make the first offer when you’re negotiating.
Learn about why February only has 28 days; why early birds and night owls aren’t the only two chronotypes; and why the anchoring effect says you should always make the first offer when you’re negotiating.
Why Does February Have 28 Days? by Joanie Faletto
A new study confirms that Early Birds and Night owls aren’t alone as the only two chronotypes by Cameron Duke
When Negotiating, You Should Always Make the First Offer by Reuben Westmaas
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-does-february-have-28-days
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 February only has 28 days; why early birds and night owls aren’t the only two chronotypes; and why you should always make the first offer when you’re negotiating.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; all the rest have thirty-one ... except for February, for some reason. Why does February only have 28 days? The answer is way more complicated than you think.
Legend has it that the first calendar was created to keep track of festivals by the maybe-mythical founder of Rome, Romulus. It was a 10-month lunar calendar that started in March with the spring equinox and ended in December. That left a three-month span in the dead of winter that the calendar didn’t even include. And you thought the week between Christmas and New Year’s was useless!
Rome's second king was Numa Pompilius, and he thought this was kind of weird. So he revised the calendar to line it up with the year's 12 lunar cycles, which add up to about 355 days. In the process, he introduced the months of January and February.
But here’s where things get superstitious: the Romans believed even numbers were unlucky. So instead of just giving the 12 months 28 days each, Pompilius mixed up the number of days from month to month so they were all odd. But the sum of an even number of odd numbers, like 12 months of odd-numbered days, is always even. So one month had to lose a day to work out to 355. Which month went on the chopping block? Our old friend February. I always knew Valentine’s Day felt unlucky.
But that’s not the end of the story. With only 355 days on the calendar, the seasons fell out of sync every few years. So the Romans threw in an entire leap month every once in a while, called Mercedonius, to sync it back up. But that leap month wasn’t standardized, so sometimes politicians would decide to throw in leap months to prolong their time in office — or nix them to get an enemy out faster. It was a mess. By the time Julius Caesar came into power in 49 BC, he was fed up with this confusing garbage. He moved to a sun-based calendar like the Egyptians had, where the year averaged 365.25 days. So, the leap month became a leap day that was tacked onto February every four years.
Seems sensible, but I’m not sure. I kind of like the idea of a spare month every year. Gives you a bit of wiggle room on your calendar.
Are you an early bird or a night owl? Most of us assume that everyone falls into one of these two categories, called chronotypes. But what if you don’t fit into either of those types neatly? Well, I have good news for you. Scientists just recently identified four new chronotypes. Now there’s room for everybody!
First, let’s talk about how you even get a chronotype — because it’s not just personal preference. Your chronotype is controlled by your circadian rhythm. Well, it is your circadian rhythm. All animals have a circadian rhythm, and it’s what determines what time of day they’re most active: like, bats are nocturnal, so their circadian rhythm is pretty different than that of most birds, which are diurnal. Humans are generally diurnal, meaning that we are most active during the day. This doesn’t mean that we all have identical circadian rhythms, though.
That’s because circadian rhythm is controlled by your genes — and there are a lot of circadian genes with plenty of variation to choose from. That makes it a bit weird that we’ve typically thought of humans as having only two chronotypes.
So to see if people fit into more chronotypes than previously thought, researchers surveyed 2,000 college students about their levels of alertness throughout the day. What they found were not just a bunch of early risers and night owls. Instead, they found six distinct chronotypes.
Most people in their study, about 40 percent of them, fit snugly into the two known chronotypes as expected. The remaining 60 percent were divided among another four chronotypes that the researchers labeled Daytime, Daytime Sleepy, Highly Active, or Moderately Active.
People with the Daytime chronotype are most alert in the afternoon, instead of morning or evening. People who are Daytime Sleepy get up early and stay up late, but get really sleepy in the middle of the day. Highly Active people report high alertness all throughout the day, and moderately active people report no real alertness peaks throughout the day.
Chronotypes aren’t just a way to classify our personalities — they’re also a way to better understand human disease. Circadian rhythms affect a ton of different cycles in your body, which can influence everything from how drugs work and how symptoms of disease appear.
So if you felt pigeonholed by our old two-party sleep system, it’s time to celebrate! Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my afternoon nap.
CODY: Here's my offer: For the next 10 minutes, I’m going to talk about the one technique that helps you win in any negotiating situation.
ASHLEY: Uhh, we don’t have that kind of time. How about 1 minute?
CODY: No way. I’m walking out this door unless I get 3 minutes. That’s my final offer.
ASHLEY: I can deal with that.
CODY: Ha HA! You just fell for the anchoring effect.
The anchoring effect says it’s always to your advantage in a negotiation to make the first offer because you’ll set the tone for the entire exchange. Incredibly, this is true even if the person you're negotiating with is aware of the effect and is actively trying not to let the first offer sway theirs.
It's called the anchoring effect because it anchors the negotiation to a certain range. For example, in one study of real estate prices, real estate agents were given a house to assess and asked to say how much the house was really worth. The actual price of the house was $75,000 (this was in 1987), but every participant was given a different fake price. Sure enough, a $65,000 price led the agents to estimate that the property was worth about $10,000 less than they did when presented with a $85,000 price.
And the anchoring effect can happen in some truly weird ways. Another study had college students bid on random items, like a wine bottle or a textbook. But before they bid, the researchers had them write down the last two digits of their social security number. Weirdly, people who wrote down a higher number ended up bidding two to three times as much as those who wrote down a lower number.
The fear is real when it comes to being first to put a number out there. It can be intimidating going in blind, without any idea of what the other person thinks. But research says bolder will give you a better outcome. You also give your opponent the opportunity to get a concession from you, and that can make them feel more satisfied with the result.
There is one situation where you probably shouldn't make the first offer, and that's when you're coming from a point of ignorance. If your opponent knows a lot more than you, then they’ll hold the advantage. But the answer then isn't to let them set the terms of negotiation: It's to improve your position by learning as much as you can beforehand.
ASHLEY: Before we recap what we learned today, we have a bit of housekeeping to do. 2 quick things: first off, we’ve received a LOT of messages about our podcast no longer working on Google Assistant or Google News. We have tech people working hard on fixing the problem. In the meantime, you can listen to Curiosity Daily on Spotify and lots of other places, but hopefully we can get everything working with Google soon.
CODY: Right. And the second thing is that last week, I was looking at the contact form on our website, curiosity-daily-dot-com. And I found a little glitch that was preventing some messages from coming through to us. I retrieved all of the missing messages, and got the website fixed. And Ashley and I read literally everything you send us, whether it’s on our website or on Twitter or via email. But I’m telling you this because if you submitted a listener question through our website back in November, or August, or — I dunno — last MARCH — then don’t be surprised if you hear us answer it on an upcoming episode. Hey: better late than never, right?
[ad lib]
CODY: Okay, so now that we’re all caught up, let’s recap what we learned today!
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Joanie Faletto, Cameron Duke, and Reuben Westmaas, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!