44. Is Empathy in Fact Immoral?
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I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, is empathy, in fact, immoral? We should all immediately learn to be as unempathetic as possible, correct? Also, what are the benefits of going where the wind may take you? I resolve to have no resolution right now. My goal is to not have a goal right now.

Stephen, I have an email here from a gentleman named Matt Wall. Matt writes,

But lately, I've read some pretty damning research that suggests that empathy actually can make people less fair, more irrational, more biased. A study by Paul Bloom involving fictional wait lists for medical treatment found that participants would move people up whose stories they knew at the expense of the strangers on the list.

I also learned that the hormone oxytocin, which I associate with love, is involved in occurrences of xenophobia. So it seems that maybe empathy can only be practically applied to an in-group at the expense of the rest of the world. It's a very sophisticated question. Such a good question. I do want to clear up this research. Paul Bloom, who's a psychologist at Yale, wrote about it in a book that was about empathy.

And I think Matt gets the details right of the study, what it argued, but it wasn't actually Paul Bloom who did that research. The research was Daniel Batson, I believe, from the University of Kansas, correct? Yes. And Daniel Batson, I have been in recent email correspondence with about his theory of altruism and

he's been a real pioneer in the field. I've read about the research arguing that empathy-induced altruism can essentially, what I would almost describe as backfire, but the experiments that he used to reach that conclusion were fantastic.

fascinating. I'm guessing you know this literature much better than I. Do you want to describe those experiments? So the gist of these experiments that Matt was describing is that you have participants making these hypothetical choices. There's a limited commodity of a good and you have to allocate it to individuals. And usually in these experiments, what Batson is doing is manipulating one of the opponents to empathy, right?

So empathy versus, in this case, the moral principle of justice. And empathy being more of a feeling kind of thing, like feeling sympathy.

sympathetic to the individual in need. And the moral principle of justice is utilitarian. Some kind of objective measurement of who needs the most. Right. And can you describe how when you're a psychological researcher, you induce empathy or decrease empathy in an experimental setting? What do you actually do to get the research subjects to empathize with someone?

So here's a typical Batson manipulation. You as a participant are going to either move people up or not on a list for terminally ill children and some life-saving measure. So in the high empathy condition, you read you're about to see an interview with a terminally ill child. Try to feel the full impact of what this child has been through and how he or she feels as a result.

And the control would be you're going to watch a video. We'll talk to you after. Well, let me read you the low empathy condition, because I think that actually gives you the greatest contrast. While you're listening to this interview, try to take an objective perspective toward what is described. Try not to get caught up in how the child who is interviewed feels. Just remain objective and detached.

And then everybody listens to an interview of a, quote, a very brave, bright 10-year-old. These are fictional creations, we should say. These are not actual sick children who are being exploited for the sake of psychological research? Yeah.

Yeah, and I'm not sure whether in this study they were led to believe that it was real or not. But yes, a fictional child who has myasthenia gravis, which is a neuromuscular disease. The research subjects are then offered some options to act on their empathy, correct? That's right. So the question is, how will this manipulation of empathy change decisions? I mean, they can, in this case, decide whether to change the place of the child on the list in a way that conflicts with principles of justice.

And in fact, after you are induced into this empathic state and you're trying to really be sympathetic, then you are more likely to move this fictional child up the list, even if that's actually displacing other children who have greater need or shorter life expectancy or more likely to benefit. So this is a case where...

might make the ultimate choice less moral. And at what rate do the high empathy treatment people essentially promote their own candidate above people who might, quote, deserve it more? I,

I actually don't know the details of the study that well, but I think the contrast is what really matters. Like by inducing empathy, can you get people to make judgments that actually move away from what could be considered objectively better moral judgment? I find this research just so interesting.

creative and illuminating too. So I'm reading here from a conclusion of one of these papers, Batson and his coauthors, right? Empathy induced altruism and justice are two independent pro-social motives, each with its own unique goal.

And also they write in resource allocation situations in which these two motives conflict. In other words, there are only so many slots on the list, whatever. Empathy induced altruism can become a source of immoral injustice. And so this is what Paul Bloom wrote about. His book was called Against Empathy, The Case for Rational Compassion.

And Matt nailed it in terms of the effect. I'm reading here a quote from the summary of Bloom's book. He argues that empathy is one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality, and that far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. I find this shocking.

shocking. And I believe what it means, Angela, is that we should all immediately learn to be as unempathetic as possible. Correct? That would be the proper conclusion here. You know, I think that a lot of Daniel Batson's work has not been really to say, you

that empathy is bad. Sure. I was kidding, by the way, when I said that we should not be empathetic. Oh, good. I was taking you literally there, Stephen. I was sarcasming. I mean, a lot of what motivated Daniel Batson to do his work is that he started out thinking about altruistic acts. People donate to charity, right?

They give up something, their money, or they donate organs. You take time out of your day. Why do people do altruistic things? You know what the economists say, don't you? It's selfish, right? Right. James Andreoni coined a phrase that I find really useful, warm glow altruism. He basically argued that

True altruism is very, very rare in the wild. But the twist is that's okay to allow someone to feel good about the way in which they help or to allow someone to feel pride when they walk by a new hospital wing and it's got their name on it. What's more important, that there's a hospital wing or that somebody gets some credit for it?

Like, why are we arguing about the root to altruism when, in fact, like, hey, there's a hospital wing? The starting point, though, for Daniel Batson wasn't even the warm glow hypothesis. It was the evolutionary argument that if I am kind to you, it must be because it's improving my gene pool likelihood. And so that's like the most narrow, selfish argument.

version of altruism there is. And he said that was his starting point. So it surprised him to discover that there are multiple paths to altruism. And one of those paths is feeling what he calls empathic concern. So it's not necessarily that I can feel the same feeling as this 10-year-old with a disease. It's just that I can have emotional regard or connection to you.

Now, if you ask me, would Batson say that that's necessarily a bad thing and that what we should really be is like Vulcans or something and just only think rationally? I don't know what Daniel would say, but I would say that the route to altruism, which goes through feeling and sentiment, which obviously can sometimes have inefficiency or sometimes come out wrong, is a good route. It's a legitimate route. And let me

Let me say this about children. When young children are developing, there is a very early stage, maybe around two or three, where they begin to be able to experience empathy and sympathy. And Jerry Kagan, the developmental psychologist, would say that if you do not develop that moral capacity to feel, then something's really wrong. He calls it a moral capacity not because it's a highly reasoned capacity, but just that it lays the foundations

for future moral judgment and action. And in fact, there are children who fail to develop it. They're called callous unemotional. And let me tell you, the research on those children... Yeah, not good, right? Not good. That makes perfect sense. But going back to Matt, our listener, the takeaway that shocked him, that shocks me...

Which is that, well, let me go back to Paul Bloom, who wrote the book about it. Here's a nice passage from Bloom. Empathy, he writes, is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now. This makes us care more about them, but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with.

Our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity toward others. It is corrosive in personal relationships. It

It exhausts the spirit and can diminish the force of kindness and love. That's an incredibly large indictment. It's pretty bold. Which again, I think to a lot of people wouldn't make sense at first glance. But at second and third, you say, well, yes, because we know from so much psychology and history that humans tend to be pretty tribal. And when

And when we are going to empathize with certain people because they are in our family, our tribe, maybe they're within the same national borders, maybe they're the people who look like us or behave like us, what we're doing is inevitably promoting their interests above others who are different. And that is not justice. That is a kind of altruistic tribalism.

Yeah. And another person who uses that exact phrase is Josh Green, neuroscientist at Harvard. And he would say that our brains were designed for tribal life, getting along with a very small group and then fighting off everybody in the out group. He's a utilitarian. And I think he would say that the more justified utility.

and better approach to allocating resources and other acts that fall into this category is to use reason and to not use our tribal emotions. And in that case, yeah, don't make your decisions entirely on empathy. We do have to reconcile these things.

Because it is part of our machinery. There's also research by Deborah Small and George Lowenstein on how if I ask you to donate to a charity and I give you a vivid story of one person, the identifiable victim, you're going to donate more than if I tell you there are 10 million people who suffer from this. So here's the reconciliation example.

If it's true that it's part of our machinery to feel emotions that drive our behavior, if it's also true that there's a tendency to neglect the suffering of many more people because our spotlight is on the few people that we happen to be paying attention to, then maybe the both-and to replace this either-or is also taking a second step and to deliberate. Because I think if you just start with the deliberation and the cold calculus, you just never get there.

The emotion gets you off the couch or it gets your wallet out, etc.,

I will say this. Empathy, I've heard described in a way that I find fruitful, is a first step toward compassion. The difference being empathy means some form of perspective taking. But the people who argue in favor of compassion would say that compassion is actually turning your empathy into action. I know Josh Green that you mentioned, he makes the argument that what's really needed is some kind of justice framework.

I read an interview once where he called it metamorality. He says utilitarianism

may be accurate, but it's a bad name for it just because people have associations with utilitarianism. He wants to rebrand utilitarianism as metamorality. He wants to rebrand utilitarianism as what he calls deep pragmatism, which boils down to this. Here, I'll read a quote from an interview he gave. Maximize happiness impartially. Try to make life as happy as possible overall, giving equal weight to

everyone's happiness. It's a metamorality because it's a system. Unlike simple rules such as don't kill people, deep pragmatism tells you how to make trade-offs. So

I think this is why many people believe that rather than picking favorites all the time and do all the virtue signaling and hand-waving that we do about a cause or a victim or an idea that has gotten popular and you want to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I support that too, that what we should try to do more is improve systems, how they work, and how to create incentives that encourage the most sensible and the fairest people

pro-social behaviors across the board. I realize that's easy to say, much harder to do, but I think that what Matt is calling attention to here is a really important idea that expressing empathy, especially on the top of your Twitter feed, for instance, is a potentially really shallow and even more troubling, potentially backfiring signal.

Well, I am actually utilitarian myself. You're now a deep pragmatist. I'm sorry. I mean, that definition, maximize happiness impartially, try to make life as happy as possible overall, giving equal weight to everyone's happiness. That is literally utilitarianism. But if he wants to rebrand it as deep pragmatism. I think it's because a lot of people now think of utilitarianism as a kind of cold hearted version of what the old utilitarians used to promote. And therefore, they're shying away from it.

It's like conservatism. A lot of conservatives I know don't like to use the word conservative anymore. It's interesting how empathy has even become a political tool. I think when I look at the U.S. at least, that the left or the Democrats consider themselves the sole possessors of empathy. And they think that everyone who considers himself...

conservative on any dimension are without empathy. Now, based on many people I know who identify as conservative, I know it's very, very wrong. But to me, that's a horrible consequence of the political duopoly and how the Republicans and Democrats treat us all like we're football fans. If you like Team X, you are required to hate everything about Team Y and believe every slander against every member of them. Talk about tribalism, right? Paradoxically, if we say this whole swath of

of the world population must lack empathy, that itself is a failure of empathy. So I think the way forward here is to say, first of all, when you hear the phrase terminally ill 10-year-old girl, I don't think the answer is to say, well, I wish I didn't feel anything when I heard the expression, but then to also hold in our minds, because that is a spotlight that

urgency and that animus is going to be potentially crowding out something which is even more important, which is all the other children whose names I just didn't hear. But it is both, Anne, because you can't really jump to complete rational calculus without acknowledging that the way we've evolved is to feel something. And I

I don't want to hang out with people who are just making cold, calculated decisions on resource allocation, even if it is to maximize the happiness of everyone. I want to hang out with people who I tell them a story about a particular person and immediately I can tell that they're feeling something. Right. But how then do you translate that feeling for that one person?

person who needs help, maybe the one victim of a crime or war. I think of cancer and there are many, many different kinds of cancers and some cancers are inherently more attractive to donors than others that happen to be much more fatal. So if you or someone you know is suffering from that particularly terrible cancer,

You're saying, well, all these other cancers, which are nowhere near as fatal, maybe they're more common, but they're not as fatal. They're getting all the attention. There is a limitation of these research studies where you are allocating dollars on a list, like who gets more. Because I think the alternative really in real life is that people just do nothing. I was on a foundation board once for this orphan cancer called carcinoid. A

A very small number of people get carcinoid. It was called caring for carcinoid. And I will say it occurred to me when I was on this, I was like, is this a

a morally good thing to try to gather charitable donations to fund this orphan disease because maybe there are other diseases that would be an even better use of those dollars. And the way that I eventually came to understand it, maybe it's just rationalization, is that the alternative is that people are probably just going to give nothing to anything. So better that they give $100 to

carcinoid cancer research than nothing. So that, I think, is the reason why we shouldn't throw out empathy altogether. It gets people to do things. I totally agree. So to answer Matt's question, is there a downside to empathy? I think the answer is an emphatic yes, there is a downside. And it's important to recognize empathy

the limitation of empathy in and of itself, but we don't want to throw out the empathy baby with the empathy bathwater because for many people, it can be the first step toward compassion or deep pragmatism, whatever you want to call it. And also, I think if you see no injustice anywhere, if

You see no pain or suffering anywhere. If you see no lack of opportunity anywhere, then I think you're just walking around with your eyes closed. And that's not so good either. And we are human beings, not Vulcans. At least one of us is. You're the utilitarian.

Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela discuss why people enjoy taking personality tests like Myers-Briggs. They love to take these BuzzFeed quizzes and other little tests to see what sort of Harry Potter character am I.

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So Angie, there are some days when I wake up and I like to think of it as just going with the wind. I just try to exist and see what chance will lead me to do or to read or to work on or think about. But then there are other days when I like to be the wind and decide very concretely and specifically what

what my activity is, even what my thinking is going to be. So I see you very much as a be the wind person, if you don't mind me saying so. And I'm probably 80% wind myself. I think there are pros and cons to being the wind or going with the wind.

I'm really curious to know what you'd have to say about whether I or one would be better off over time sticking to one or the other. I am absolutely more of a be the one person. And I think that that's partly why I get a lot done. But I have to say, especially lately, I've been thinking about the tradeoff. If you are goal oriented seven days a week during quarantine,

all your waking hours. And by the way, let me add that I'm a terrible sleeper. And because I wake up sometimes during the night, I can tell you what I'm thinking about or dreaming about. I'm working in my dream. So I'm not only goal-directed in my conscious hours, I'm apparently goal-directed and working in my unconscious hours. There could be a lot of different trade-offs, but one of them I do think is creativity and capitalizing on serendipity because, you know, me with my to-do list, I'm just pounding out

what I knew I was going to do in advance. And then I'm missing opportunities that are right in front of me, but I'm not noticing them because I'm just getting things done. So I've been thinking about that. Maybe I should move from 100% be the wind, you know, 0% go the wind to, you know,

95.5. You're willing to let up 5% of your wind. At least that. And I could be persuaded. Hey, that was a starting offer. It's interesting you say that about creativity because on the days that I am going with the wind, I feel more creative. I've got more ideas coming at me.

Whereas the days that I'm being the wind, fewer ideas, more about execution and so on. And I guess it's why so many of us like experiences like travel and trying different things and fresh starts. It's an opportunity to go with the wind, even if you don't have that as your norm. But I guess the dream would be to be

to be and go with the wind at the same time, right? - I don't think it's possible. I think it's partly why the brain has the default mode network and then the prefrontal executive function. I know we talked about this briefly at least before, but when we are task oriented, like I'm proofreading a paper, I'm writing an email, I'm talking to you, I'm getting something done, there are parts of the brain that are recruited largely in the prefrontal cortex

These are our executive functions, among others. But one discovery that was made reasonably recently was that when the brain is at rest, quote unquote, when you're not actually overtly engaging in some task or activity that has a purpose, the brain is still doing something. And this is called the default mode. And the default mode network is

includes all these brain structures. They're on both the left side and the right side of the brain. And this is what actually ends up being active. And since the discovery of the brain at rest actually doing stuff, scientists have begun to understand a little bit about what this default mode is for. And some of that is about self-referential thinking, like you're

replaying things where you're center of action. Some of it is emotion, replaying emotional episodes or thinking about things that have an emotional valence. But there's some speculation and maybe more than speculation because there's some empirical data on the default mode being important to creativity, like making novel associations that are not obvious that could be useful. When I think about being the win, there's a phrase that we've all used, a type A personality.

And this goes a few decades back, but I'm curious, is type A personality a real thing? And is it a personality or is it a behavior? Is it fixed or dynamic?

You know, this idea of a type B person, I remember growing up in the 70s, I heard it a lot. I think it was because my dad... Was one? Yeah, describing himself. And I always wondered, is there a B? Is there a C? I thought it was a Z. Just the way I heard about it, I thought Z must have been the other end of the spectrum. But are there all the other letters? Are there 26 different types? The modern personality research...

for the most part, stays away from casting people as types. So interestingly, I think what people like, like they want to know what type they are. Are they type A or are they not type A? For people who have taken the Myers-Briggs personality test, they want to know, are they an E or an I? Are they an ENFP or an INTJ? There are all these types.

these categories. But the reason I think that modern personality psychology doesn't talk a lot about types is that for the most part, scientists don't think that's the way human nature is. We're not categorically, you know, type A was supposed to be stereotypically uptight, kind of stressed, had to get their own way. You have a lot of heart attacks. Yes, exactly. My dad would say things about his type A personality while clutching his

chest, not like he was having a heart attack, but he would bemoan that he had a type A personality. Anyway, I don't want to deny that when people describe a type A personality that they don't exist, but almost everything you can think about yourself exists more on a continuum than

then as a category, not like either you are type A or you're not, but more how type A are you? You mentioned how obsessed some people are with personality types and especially Myers-Briggs. So like somebody who finds out that they're whatever, ENFP, is that a combination? That's me, actually. That's why I mentioned it. Oh, OK. So I'm curious to know why you think people want to

know their type, whether it's in the old days a type A, now an ENFP. In other words, what curiosity is that satisfying exactly? Well, there's two levels at which this is interesting. First of all, the fact that people want to hold up a psychological mirror to themselves and see what's in it. People want to know about themselves. You know, they love to take these BuzzFeed quizzes and other little tests to see what sort of Harry Potter character am I. But maybe even more interesting is if I said, you know,

Hey, on extroversion, you're about a 3.6 on a 1 to 5 scale. And here's the distribution. People would be like, oh, but if I said you're an E, you're not an I, you're an E. We really seem to crave that kind of typology. What's a little weird about it to me is that most people believe in capacity and potential and change and so on, all of which are dynamic.

I think of types as fixed. So is this a desire to have a fixed base or am I missing something there? I think there are multiple motives. So why do we have this fascination with types of people? Part of it might be a bias toward fixed traits. Like, OK, well, that makes it simple. That explains things.

everything about Stephen Dubner. He's an INTJ. Hell yeah. By the way, have you taken the Myers-Briggs? I have, but it's been a long time. You don't remember your letters? As evidence of how little it means to me, I have no idea. But I'm happy to take it again at some point. It's really long. I just want to warn you. Oh, never mind. I'm pretty lazy, too. Is there a lazy type? Because I could be that. Yeah, right. It

You don't answer all the questions. They give you another output. I think there might be kind of a like life would be simple if there were these fixed traits and I could understand it. But I think it's even deeper than that. There's something about the simplicity of categorical thinking. We just like bright lines. It's a lot more digestible. So let's say that we revert to my mushy measurement scale rather than type A and B or rather than INTJ versus whatever.

That we stick with the wind metaphor here. Okay. And so let's just say that I'm feeling very windy one day. I'm a cyclone today, but I don't want to be. I want to go with the wind. Do you have any advice for me? This idea of being intentionally without intention. I think that's what you're saying. It's like, I resolve to have no resolution right now. My goal is to not have a goal right now. I crave having no craving.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes people say, I plan to be spontaneous this afternoon. Right. I know it sounds ridiculous. It sounds like a New Yorker cartoon or something, but I think it is possible. And actually, there was recent work that was published in Trends and Cognitive Sciences, which we affectionately call TICS, T-I-C-S. And it was about mind wandering with and without intention, which, again, I understand mind wandering without intention. Your mind's just wandering. It's going wherever it wants.

But what about mind wandering with intention? The authors want to say that you can distinguish between these two kinds of mind wandering. And in fact, the kind of mind wandering that, as we briefly discussed in a prior conversation, Dan Gilbert and Matt Killingsworth, their research suggesting that mind wandering is associated with unhappiness. The wandering mind is an unhappy mind. That...

may or may not be true of intentional mind wandering. Like those days that you wake up, Stephen, and you say, today I go with the wind. Those are days that you're not unhappy, that you actually want to just, you know, be chilling like a villain. I guess if you're also used to being the wind, going with the wind is a novelty, and therefore there's the appeal of novelty. What about vice versa, though? What if I feel like I am going with the wind so much that

That I'm just being blown all over the yard and that I would prefer to be the wind. Do you have any advice for that scenario? Well, for people who really want to have more directed, intentional activity in their life, I would point them to first and foremost, this research by Locke and Latham, Gary Latham and Ed Locke.

their work is on goal setting. And basically the idea is that human beings are by nature actually goal setting creatures. So we spontaneously say to ourselves and to others, this is something that I hope happens. A goal is a desired future state. And,

And goal setting is when you very intentionally say what that desired future state is. And if you say, I have a goal to not have sugar in my coffee for the next 14 days, or I have a goal not to tease my little sister so much.

Those intentions, once you have specified them and brought them to conscious awareness and ideally defined appropriately challenging goals, now you're going to be much, much, much more productive. So let me ask you one last question about this, Angie. As a person who we've determined is at least 95% wind and probably 99.5% wind,

Do you look down on people who go with the wind? Let me rephrase that. How much do you look down on me? And just how much? Oh, contraire, Stephen Dubner. I look up to people who can go with the wind more, not only because I think that they're more creative. You know, maybe I'm just like executing these things, but I'm not seeing the big picture. But also just as an end itself, I just saw that Disney animated movie Soul. Did you see it?

I've heard of it, which for me is really good because we know that I don't know much about movies. So you've taken the first step. Jamie Foxx voices a character. That's what I know. It's so good. And anyway, I won't tell you anything about it because I don't want to spoil it for you. But this movie is not about grit. It is not about goal setting. It is not about productivity. It's not about achievement. The moral of this story is about going with the wind and

listening to the wind and seeing a little leaf that blows by in the wind and saying, what a beautiful leaf. And I remember when I went to bed that night, I was like, oh, I wonder if this is Contra, like all of my work. And then when I woke up the next morning, I realized that I think getting things done and being a directed, intentional person is wonderful. But I think the movie had a really good point because sometimes we and everybody else are better off. We just go with the wind.

No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and coming soon, Sadeer Breaks the Internet. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and now here's a fact check of today's conversations.

In the first half of the episode, Angela breaks down social psychologist Daniel Batson's research on empathy-induced altruism. The experiment she references is part of a 1995 study where participants were asked to listen to audio interviews, not video interviews as Stephen and Angela imply, with a fictional terminally ill 10-year-old named Sherry Summers.

In order to effectively induce empathy, the researchers did lead the participants to believe that Sherry was real and said that as a thank you for taking part in the study, participants could choose whether to move the child up on a list to receive expensive pharmaceutical treatment or not.

As Angela alluded to, 73% of women and 73% of men in the high empathy group did choose to move Sherry up the list. This compared with just 27% of women and 40% of men in the group who were told to remain objective.

Also, in his email, listener Matt writes about a connection between oxytocin and xenophobia. But Stephen and Angela never address that reference. In 2011, a double-blind, placebo-controlled study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

found that, quote, oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. The researchers write that these findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate love drug or cuddle chemical and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.

Finally, during their discussion about Type A personalities, Stephen and Angela wonder if there is also Type B, C, or Z personalities. The idea of a Type A personality was first proposed in the 1950s by cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman.

The theory was based on years of research showing that people who had certain personality traits, which they grouped as type A, like impatience and irritability, were significantly more prone to heart attacks than those with more relaxed, go-with-the-flow, type B personality traits. In 1974, they published a book about their findings called Type A Behavior and Your Heart.

the public embraced this terminology. But Dr. Friedman was unhappy with the label for many of the reasons that Stephen and Angela proposed. According to the medical director of the Meyer Friedman Institute, Friedman was concerned that the idea of personality type suggested something fixed and unchangeable. When he actually believed that these traits were learned behaviors reinforced by habit and could be changed with time and effort. That's it for the Fact Check.

No Stupid Questions is produced by Freakonomics Radio and Stitcher. Our staff includes Allison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Mark McCluskey, James Foster, and Emma Terrell. Thanks also to Lyric Bowditch for her help with this episode. Our theme song is And She Was by Talking Heads.

Special thanks to David Byrne and Warner Chapel Music. If you'd like to listen to the show ad-free, subscribe to Stitcher Premium. You can also follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show and on Facebook at NSQ show.

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