TED Talks in the classroom Many educators use TED Talks to stimulate discussions with students or to complement course materials and we encourage you to do so as well. The sponsor slide should be a static slide, no moving graphics or commercials are allowed. If you really want to tell millions of people why the chicken crossed the road, is it really that difficult to do it standing still with your hands in your pockets? What do you love about what you do?
«Could your language affect your ability to save money?» by Keith Chen
Years ago, I was a voracious watcher of TED talks. I like how they’re short, incisive, and usually represented the starting thread of an idea or concept that you could slowly unravel for many hours, if not days, if you really wanted to. For example, here’s one from Tim Urban, creator of Wait But Why his post titled The Tail End is required reading for can you make money of off ted talks human beingson what goes on inside the mind of a master procrastinator. Tim Urban is great at deconstructing ideas and explaining them in an entertaining way that captures your attention and holds it until the very end. This thread just goes into a simple idea — why do we procrastinate? Why do we not do the work that makes sense and is hard but instead we go play in the Dark Playground?
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I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly. Except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck that helped earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant, because this game’s been rigged, and you’ve got the upper hand. You’ve got more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources. And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself: How might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way you think about yourself and regard that other player? So, we ran a study on the UC Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question.
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I want you to, for a moment, think can you make money of off ted talks playing a game of Monopoly. Except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck that helped earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant, because this game’s been rigged, and you’ve got the upper hand. You’ve got more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources. And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself: How might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way you think moeny yourself and regard that other player?
So, we ran a study on the UC Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question. We brought in more than pairs of strangers into the lab, and with the flip of a coin, randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game. They got two times as much money; when they passed Go, they collected twice the salary; and they got to roll both dice instead of one, so they got to move around the board a lot.
And over the course of 15 minutes, we watched through hidden cameras what happened. What I want to do today, for the first time, is show you a little bit of what we saw. You’ll to have to pardon the sound quality, because again, these were hidden cameras. So we’ve provided subtitles. Paul Piff: So it was quickly apparent to players that something was up. One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person, and yet, as the game unfolded, we saw very notable differences, dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players.
The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with the piece as he went. We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players.
We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the. It’s on the bottom right corner. That allowed us to watch participants’ consummatory behavior. So we’re just tracking how many pretzels participants eat. Paul Piff: OK, so no surprises, people are on to moneyy. They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place. One even asks, like you just saw, «Is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick? Paul Piff: And yiu the game went on, one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person — less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they’re doing.
RP: You owe me 24 dollars. You’re going to lose all your money soon. I’ll buy it. I have so much money. I have so much money, it takes me forever. RP 3: You’re going to run out of money soon. I’m pretty much untouchable at this point.
Paul Piff: And here’s what I think was really, really interesting: cna that, at the end of the 15 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly They talked about what they’d done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game. Can you make money of off ted talks they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation — including that flip of a coin — that had randomly off them into that privileged position in the first place.
And that’s a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage. Now, this game of Monopoly can be used as a metaphor for understanding society and its hierarchical structure, wherein some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status, and a lot of people don’t; they have a lot less wealth and a lot less status and a lot less access to valued resources.
And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies. What we’ve been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of ocf, and their ideology of self-interest increase.
In surveys, we’ve found that it’s actually wealthier individuals who are more tzlks to moralize greed being good, and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral. Now, what I want to do today is talk about some of the implications of this ideology self-interest, talk about why we should care about those implications, and end with what might be. Some of the first studies that we ran in this area looked at helping behavior, something social psychologists call «pro-social behavior.
In one of the studies, we bring rich and poor members of the community into the lab, and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars. We told the participants they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves, or they could share a portion of it, if they wanted to, with a stranger, who’s totally anonymous.
They’ll never meet that stranger; the stranger will never meet. And we just monitor how much people. Individuals who made 25, sometimes under 15, dollars a year, gave 44 percent more of their money to the stranger than did individuals making ,dollars a year. We’ve had people play games to see who’s more or less likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize.
In one of the games, we actually rigged a computer so that die rolls over a certain score were impossible — You couldn’t get above 12 in this game, and yet We ran another study where we looked at whether people would be inclined to take candy from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified as being reserved for children —.
I’m not kidding — I know it sounds like I’m making a joke. We explicitly told participants: «This candy is for children participating in a developmental lab nearby.
They’re in studies. This is for. Participants who felt rich took two times as much candy as participants who felt poor. We’ve even studied cars. Not just any cars, but whether drivers of different kinds of cars are more or less inclined to break the law. In one of these studies, we looked at whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk.
Now in California, as you all know, because I’m sure we all do this, it’s the law to stop for a pedestrian ofd waiting to cross. So here’s an example of how we did it. That’s our confederate off to the left, posing as a pedestrian.
He approaches as the red truck successfully stops. In typical California fashion, it’s overtaken by the monej who almost runs our omney. Now here’s an example of a more expensive car, a Prius, driving through, and a BMW doing the. So we did this for hundreds of vehicles on several days, just tracking who stops and who doesn’t.
What we found was as the expensiveness of a car increased None of the cars — none of the cars — in our least expensive car category broke the law. Close to 50 percent of the cars in our most expensive vehicle category broke the law.
We’ve run other studies, finding that wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations, to endorse unethical behavior at work, like stealing cash from the cash register, taking bribes, lying to customers.
Now, I don’t mean tde suggest that it’s only wealthy people who show these patterns of behavior. Not at all — in fact, I think that we all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when or if to put our own interests above the interests of other people.
And that’s understandable, because the American dream is an idea in which we all have an equal opportunity to succeed and prosper, as long as monry apply ourselves and work hard. And a piece of that means that sometimes, you need to put talkss own interests above the interests and well-being of other people around you. But what we’re finding is that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you.
Here I’ve plotted for you ogf mean household income received by each fifth and top five percent of the population over the last 20 years. Inthe differences between the different quintiles of the population, in terms of income, are fairly egregious. Yo not difficult to discern that there are differences. But over the last 20 years, that significant difference has become a Grand Canyon of sorts between those at the top csn everyone.
In fact, the top 20 percent of our population own close to 90 percent of the total wealth in this country. We’re at unprecedented levels of economic inequality. What that means is that wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals, but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us.
And if it’s the case, as we’ve been finding, that the wealthier you are, the more entitled you feel to that wealth, and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests above the interests of other people, and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest, well, then, there’s no reason to think that those patterns will change.
In fact, there’s every reason to think that they’ll only get worse, and that’s what it would look like if things just stayed the same, at the same linear rate, over the next 20 years. Now inequality — economic inequality — is something we should all be concerned about, and tted just because of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but because individuals and groups with lots of economic inequality do worse There’s monej lot of really compelling research coming out from top labs all over the world, showcasing the range of things that are undermined as economic inequality gets worse.
Social mobility, things we really care about, physical health, social trust, all go down as inequality goes up. Similarly, negative things in social collectives and societies, things like obesity, and violence, imprisonment, and punishment, are exacerbated as economic inequality increases. Again, these are outcomes not just experienced by a few, but that resound across all strata of society.
Even people at the top experience these outcomes. So what do we do? This cascade of self-perpetuating, pernicious, negative effects could seem like something that’s spun out of control, and there’s nothing we can do about it, certainly nothing we as individuals could.
But in fact, we’ve been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions, small changes to people’s values, small nudges in certain directions, can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy. Fof instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation or the advantages of community, cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people.
In one study, we had people watch a brief video, just 46 seconds long, about childhood poverty that served as a reminder of the needs of others in the world around.
And after watching that, we looked at how willing people were to offer up their own time to a stranger presented to them in the lab, who was in distress. After watching this video, an hour talms, rich people became just as generous of their own time to help out this other person, a stranger, as someone who’s poor, suggesting that these differences are not innate or categorical, but are so malleable to slight changes in people’s values, and little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy.
And beyond the walls of our lab, we’re even beginning to see signs of change in society. Bill Gates, one of our nation’s wealthiest individuals, in his Harvard commencement speech, talked about the problem of inequality facing society as being the most daunting challenge, and talked about what must be done to combat it, saying, «Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries — but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.
And there’s the emergence of dozens of grassroots movements, like «We are the 1 percent,» «Resource Generation,» or «Wealth for Yed Good,» in which the most privileged members of the population, members of the one percent and elsewhere, people who are wealthy, are using their own economic resources, adults and youth alike — that’s what’s most striking to me — leveraging their own privilege, their own economic resources, to combat inequality by advocating for social policies, changes in social values and changes in of behavior that work against their own economic interests, but that may ultimately restore the American dream.
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