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00:00

[music background]

MN: Allison, have you heard about the egg?

AS: No, what egg?

MN: The brown egg.

AS: The brown egg.

MN: The brown egg.

AS: Still don't know what you're talking about.

MN: The brown egg that has the most Likes on social media of anything. Not just in the egg category. [laughter] Anything. Like 55 million Likes of this plain brown egg. What is your explanation, as an economist for that?

AS: People like eggs a lot. [laughter]

MN: They like eggs more than anything. Literally anything else in the world.

AS: There's the symmetry. There's the comforting color.

MN: It's a soothing brown. Second question for you: what do the brown egg and cryptocurrency have in common?

AS: Cholesterol. [laughter]

MN: Only cholesterol? Everyone who eats both has cholesterol. And, I think they're both interesting examples of how the humans can really get excited about things, that there's hype around things where we suddenly get a little bit carried away. We sort of lose sight of who we are. Why do we have that kind of irrational

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exuberance about these different things?

AS: There’s countless biases and quirks that make us less than perfect decision-makers. Like, why do I keep buying expensive shoes when I just wear the same pair of sneakers every day?

MN: Why every night am I the kind of person who is going to go for a run in the morning and then every morning I'm definitely not the kind of person who goes for a run in the morning?

AS: Why do I get nervous every time I get onto a plane but I never have any problems getting into a car?

MN: And why, despite so many red flags, were so many people so optimistic about the stock market right until the minute it crashed in the fall of 2008?

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Given that we know, we see these examples in the world, we look at ourselves and think, "I did a ridiculous thing again today." Why do we keep doing the things we do?

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MN: I'm Mike Norton and I'm the host of Talking Green. I'm also a social psychologist at Harvard Business School. And I study the way people behave and misbehave. On Talking Green we explore how psychological forces drive attitudes and decisions around money and investing. This episode,

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and every episode, I'll be joined by Allison Schrager, an economist, journalist and culture maven. She's the author of the recent book, An Economist Walks Into a Brothel.

AS: Hey Mike! Today we're gonna talk about a huge influence on our decision-making: human irrationality. We all do little things that don't make sense. But the way our irrationality affects our money has major consequences. We're gonna get at why we're hard-wired to be irrational, and how it affects our finances.

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02:26

MN: This is Talking Green.

AS: An original podcast from TD Ameritrade and T Brand Studio at The New York Times.

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02:38

MN: So Allison, this first episode is all about rationality, or actually I guess I should say, irrationality. And I'm wondering if you have any personal quirks or habits that you feel like fall in the general domain of being irrational? And if you don't, do you have a loved one [laughter] who has habits that you have noticed are, uh, crazily irrational?

AS: I always tap the right side of the plane as I get on.

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MN: Hmm.

AS: 'Cause I believe that will keep the plane safe. And you know, I have evidence because every plane I've been on, I've tapped the right side and it has,

MN: 100%

AS: Been a safe flight.

MN: I was always interested in, uh, there's a lot of research in psychology and economics on the hot hand in sports, like, are there streaks that are, you know, defy chance? And I was always struck by the, so if, if in basketball, if someone's hit four shots in a row, they're hot, right? So they're definitely gonna hit their fifth shot. If someone's missed four shots in a row, they're due, and they're definitely gonna hit their next shot. [laughs] So in any case, we have these crazy theories of what's going, you know, it's going to go this way, it's going to go that way. And they can be completely nonsensical and contradictory. Do you see things in the market where people are doing the equivalent of, of tapping on the plane door where it could actually affect them in negative ways?

AS: Yeah. You know, I once went to a horse race where people would bet on horses based on the name.

MN: [laughter]

AS: And I think you see people sometimes doing that with stocks.

MN: And why do you think, is it just the feeling, "I might get lucky because there's some connection with the name"?

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AS: I think it's partly we're looking for a sense of control. You know, to take order from randomness. But, also people like to go with what's familiar. We're biased towards things that we know. Or know that we like.

MN: It makes me think, too, about, the, it's not contradictory, but it feels that way, where what we love to do is pick our own stocks and, and play the market. And then, also at the same time, we, once we've picked, we completely show crazy sunk costs.

AS: Well, it could be worse than that. I mean there's also evidence that people hold on to losers and sell their winners.

MN: Uh-huh.

AS: They feel like, "Well, I picked that one and it's down, but eventually it's going to go up." As opposed to, "This one's up, so it probably won't go up further anyway." Like that's actually not true. That's not how it works.

MN: Any sense of why we uniquely think we're the one who can overcome our biases and, and sort of behave rationally?

AS: Well, there's certainly overconfidence, and all the biases that we see, like familiarity. I think also it speaks to that feeling of a sense of control. It's like that superstition of touching the plane, is like, you know, I can look at this data and make sense of it.

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MN: There is this sense of like, "I can get it right and let's play it out that way."

AS: Um-hmm.

MN: And then would you ever consider not tapping the airplane door?

AS: No.

MN: No.

AS: No. It keeps everyone on the plane [music starts] safe. What would I do? I'd feel so guilty.

MN: So you're saving hundreds, not just your own life, but hundreds of lives each time you,

AS: Exactly. It's on me.

MN: Yeah. There's no way you can stop. It's perfectly rational.

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MN: So there are lots of these little things we do in our everyday lives that are totally irrational. Like your plane tapping. But they don't really have any big consequences. We can kind of get away with being a little nonsensical in a lot of areas of our lives.

AS: Right. But when it comes to money, our tendency to think irrationally can have huge consequences, on a personal level and economy-wide. And when you think about major market events, like the Great Recession, or the popularity of cryptocurrencies, part of what causes them is irrational human behavior.

MN: So we've got these small personal quirks, and then we've got these gigantic market events. But the big question across both of them is, "Why?" Why are we so irrational? And especially, why are we so irrational with our money?

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I got the chance to speak to Dan Ariely recently about the roots of human irrationality. Dan's a psychologist at Duke. He's a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. If you don't get the joke, think about it for a second. And he's a leading thinker on all things irrational. He's also an adviser and a friend of mine. And one of his favorite thing to do, probably in the entire world, is to make fun of me.

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Thanks Dan for joining us.

DA: Well, my pleasure. Great to be here.

MN: Any decisions of mine that you particularly remember as being incredibly foolish? I can think of about 30. [laughter] What biases was I demonstrating, uh, in my preparation for my first talk?

DA: I, I think an egocentric bias would be one of them. Eh, the curse of knowledge would be another. But, no, we had the lot of, a lot of fun, I think.

MN: For people listening, is, we hear the word behavioral economics a lot. It seems to be applied to every single thing now. What is behavioral economics?

DA: So, so there's maybe kind of two models,

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two versions of behavioral economics that I think are important. The first one is just a contrast to rational theory. So in the standard rational economic theory, people can think about everything. We have unlimited computational power. We take everything into account. And as a consequence, we always, always, always, always, always make the right decisions. And that's kind of an assumption. Behavioral economics doesn't assume anything about people. It just experimentally puts people in different situations and see how people behave. And when you see how people behave, you turn out that people don't take all the information into account. We have biased ways to look at it. Eh, we have emotions. We don't consider all the options, all kinds of biases.

MN: One thing that always struck me in the first version, is if you, if you ask anyone, you know, think of your friends and family, are, are any of them even vaguely rational? Of course, everybody says, "Well, no, not at all. Of course not." And so this idea that somehow aggregated up, we'd all be rational, was always just interesting to me as a, as a theory of how humans work.

DA: Which one of your friends is rational?

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MN: Right. Other than yourself, who of course is rational, is anybody else in your life rational?

DA: Yup. And then, and then there's a second definition of irrationality, and, and that's kind of my working definition, is that being irrational is that, when we don't understand the influences, eh, on our own behaviors. We're not aware of the, the biased ways in which our brain processes information. So sometimes we, we trust it too much, and we end up making mistakes. Eh, so for example, anchoring, right? This idea that we can, eh, go to people and we say, eh, "Would you pay $7 for this cup of coffee?" And people would say, "Yes," or, "No." And to other people we'd come, and we'd say, "Would you pay $3 for this cup of coffee? Yes or no?" And then we say, "Okay, so what's the maximum you would pay?" And we find that people who were asked the question initially about $7 versus three, give us the higher number. And not only do they give us higher numbers, but you say, "Were you influenced by this question about three or seven?" They say, "No, I was not influenced by that."

MN: So it sounds like people think they know the actual objective value of

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things. But that value can be determined by things like how much they paid for the last cup of coffee.

DA: Yep.

MN: And there's some wonderful research, you know, the research suggests that these biases that are often shown in the lab actually are out there in the world, as well. And they affect real decisions. So really interesting research about if you move from a very expensive city to a less expensive city, you'll pay more for houses in the less expensive city, than if you move from a not expensive city to a not expensive city. The idea again is that you're anchored on whatever the property values were where you were, and now you bring that anchor to the new market. And you could get new information. And you could say, "Oh, I know what's happening. I'm anchoring on my old value." And instead we say, "No, it seems like a pretty good price. I'm happy to pay it."

DA: That's right. And, with housing there's so much information out there, right? So it's kind of a shocking eh, idea. I remember when I graduated, I moved to Massachusetts, to Cambridge. And in the beginning I couldn't believe the prices of housing. I, I thought, you know, there must be some other housing there.

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They're hiding, em, them from us. This, this can't possibly, possibly be.

MN: You were coming from North Carolina up to Cambridge, which is a somewhat, let's say, somewhat expensive housing market.

DA: Yes.

MN: Um-hmm.

DA: And then when I came back here, of course everything, like, looked ridiculously, ridiculously cheap. And you just, you just get used to it.

MN: So the, the phrase that you use often is, is "predictably irrational." And I think it's, it's important to think about because people display these various tendencies or biases, but they're actually pretty regular. And that means that, that's, it's sort of how we're designed. We're not all over the place. It's just that we misunderstood how we're designed.

DA: Yes, and I think nowhere is it coming to better, eh, heads with being irrational than when, when we talk about money. Because if you think about what we were designed evolutionary to deal with, it was certainly not with something as abstract as, as money. And certainly we were not designed to think about anything long term, right? So evolution has

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its own way of, eh, thinking about what's useful and not useful about people. And a lot of it is about survival and, eh, quick action and eating food when it's available, and eh, avoiding risk, and doing all kinds of things. And, and money is a, is a new invention. And not only, not only money is a new invention, we invent new versions of money all the time. And what we're doing, very sadly, is we are creating financial decision making that is making it harder and harder for us to function in. So consider the following. Imagine that I said, "Mike, I'm going to give you $50 a day. Every morning I'll show up in your apartment. I'll give you $50. That's the money you have to spend for the day.

MN: I'd prefer to get it via bank transfer or something, rather than have to see you every morning. But still it's generous of you. I'll take the $50. [laughter]

DA: That's the cost. Em, so I'll, I'll give you the $50. Very quickly you would understand the consequences of your action. You understand that if you have a big lunch, you might not have money for dinner.

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And, and the consequences of your action would become very clear. Now, what would happen if I gave you the money for a month? Eh, what if I added credit card, and student loans and the, and the mortgage, and saving for your kid's, eh, college, and, eh, saving for retirement? Now the consequences of our actions are so hidden and complex that it's very, very hard to think about. When our lives are so complex, the trade offs are very unclear. And, and what happens when the trade offs are not clear? It's not as if we do average trade offs. We just don't deal with it. And when we don't deal with it, we end up spending way too much now, and not saving enough for the future.

MN: So because money is so complicated to think about, we just sort of focus on what's right in front of us, which means we can sometimes miss out on opportunities that might put us in a better position in the future.

DA: That's the issue of opportunity costs. Do we see what we're giving up? And, and the nature of money, plus the nature of complexity of money, eh, credit cards, student loans and so on, is just making things much more murky.

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We have to realize that we live in a world that is trying to derail us. You and I have goals in life. Everybody has goals in life and, and the, the world has also goals. So think about something simple like a supermarket. You go to the supermarket, and you have a plan of what you want to buy. But the supermarket also has a plan. And their plan is not the same as yours. And what they put at the end of the aisle, and what they put at eye level, and what they put at the easy to reach places, are not the things that are necessarily on your priority list. So it's a combination of, A, thinking about money the right way is very tough, and B, we live in a competitive environment in which every supermarket, every coffee shop, and every website, and every app wants something from us, and they want our time. They want our money. They want our attention. And they design the environment. And we fail.

MN: Yeah. And I think that, that one of the perceptions of this general domain of research, behavioral economics, whatever you want to call it, is

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that it's, it's a bit negative. It's sort of showing that people aren't good at things, and it's almost like, fatalistic and you know, "Well our brain is that way. There's absolutely nothing, nothing we can do about it." But, you have this phrase, "the upside of irrationality." More optimistically, what, why is there upside? What advice do you have for us?

DA: So, first of all, I think the upside is that we have some things that are irrational but wonderful. Eh, our ability to care about other people. Eh, our ability to be motivated, eh, love, eh, poetry, eh, art. There's really lots of wonderful things about, eh, humanity, eh, but also it's about our ability to build a better system. So my interest is to say that there's lots of things that are wrong with money, eh, and it's good to understand them, and so on. But the real thing is to try to design for them. To take human frailty into account, eh, in everything that comes with how we think about money, and to say let's kind of design different payment methods.

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And let's design different wealth assessment tools. And let's design different checking accounts. And let's design eh, different financial statements. And, and if we do that, eh, we can try and push behavior in a better way. [music starts]

MN: Dan Ariely, thank you so much for joining us.

DA: Mike, I only am sorry that we didn't get to do this over a beer, but eh, next time.

MN: Next time. [laughs]

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AS: So Mike, what I got from Dan is that there's so much in the world around us that is not designed to be in our best interest. We live in a competitive environment.

MN: That's exactly right. And when our brains have evolved to optimize for survival, not for complex money-related decisions, we often over-simplify or ignore things. And that causes us to easily succumb to a whole host of cognitive biases. Like anchoring bias, that we just learned about from Dan, that further trip us up.

AS: When you think about it that way, some of the big market events that have really rocked the economy start to make more sense. Individual people trying to make decisions about mortgages, or

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trying to understand a complex new digital currency. Their bias behavior sometimes leads to huge market fluctuations.

MN: Exactly. And one bias that's actually one of my favorite biases, which is a strange thing to say, but it's because it plays a particularly big role in investor behavior, is optimism bias. It's so interesting because we think about optimism as a positive thing in our lives in general, and it definitely is in a lot of ways, but it can have pretty negative consequences for our finances.

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MN: I got the chance to chat with Tali Sharot, whose a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, who literally wrote the book on optimism. And I got her thoughts on when optimism is good for us, and when it can lead us a little bit astray.

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TS: So what I study is the optimism bias, which is basically expecting the future to be better than what it actually ends up being.

MN: I'm Irish Catholic, so we're not, uh, optimism isn't very good, but anyway, carry on. Yeah.

TS: Our research suggests that 80% of the population has an optimism bias and that includes people who don't necessarily believe

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that they do.

MN: Hmm.

TS: And people who don't necessarily categorize themselves as optimists.

MN: How do we, kind of, live our lives to end up with the optimism bias? What are the ways that we interpret the world where we end up thinking optimistically instead of pessimistically?

TS: Um-hmm. What we found a few years ago is that people tend to take unexpected positive information about the future and integrate it into their beliefs much easier, much quicker than unexpected negative information. So it's how we learn. And if you go about life learning a little bit more from these positive pieces of information than negative pieces of information, then you create this optimistic bias in the way that you view the future and the world, in general.

MN: So if I'm a investor, let's call this investor, "Mike," just for ease of explication. And Mike is looking at his portfolio every day, and it, it shows a 3% increase. What is that gonna do to him, versus it shows a 3% decrease?

TS: Yeah. So we, we show that you are more likely to

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change your beliefs, for example, of, of how much you're worth, or how much gain you're going to have in the next month or year when you see positive information, such as your gains going up, than when you see negative information, such as your gain going down. So you learn a little bit more from that positive, than the negative, and change your predictions a little bit more. But the interesting thing is, not only do we learn more, a little bit more from the positive than the negative, we also are less likely to look for information when we expect it to be bad.

MN: Hmm.

TS: So there's a great study that we've actually then replicated under laboratory conditions, but the original study was from George Loewenstein and colleagues, where they wanted to know when people look into their accounts to check on their stocks. And what they found is that when the market was more likely to go up, people were more likely to log into their accounts, right? They expect the market went up. "I gain money." They wanted a little sniff of the good news. And when the market went down, they were less likely to login, to check on their accounts. So, they didn't have any desire to make any transaction. I think it was, you know, Friday evening, or something like that. But it was just gaining the good news

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versus, versus bad news. And we did the same in, in our lab where we have a simulated market. And we gave people some money. They invested the money and bought some stocks. But then on every trial we showed them what's going on with the market, "Market's going up. Market's going down." And we asked them, "Hey, do you want to know how much you're worth now?" And there was a little trick: if they wanted to know, they had to pay us money so we could tell them how much they're worth. And if they didn't want to know, they also had to pay us money to not know. And again, we found when the market was more likely to go up, they would pay us more for us to show them how much they were worth. When the market was going down, they paid us more to avoid that information.

MN: [laughs]

TS: So you have bias information in front of you.

MN: And they'll literally actually pay money out of their own pocket for you not,

TS: Right.

MN: So it's, it's not even,

TS: Right.

MN: That they won't log on, but they'll literally take any action necessary to just not see the thing in case it's bad news.

TS: Now that being said, I have to say that the other thing that matters is big changes in the market. So when there are big changes in market, people want to know whether it's up or down. But otherwise they want to have a little bit of more information

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when they expect it to be good.

MN: And why do we kind of do that? That's, there's sort of a, we hear some good things and we're, we think, "Oh, that must be correct." Then we hear some bad things and we think, "Well, maybe I'll discount that." What, where does that come from, that kind of tendency to update with the positive and completely discount the negative?

TS: So we used to think something along the lines of, well, there are adaptive advantages to it. For example, people who end up having positive views of the future, their stress and anxiety is reduced, and that's good for the physical health. It motivates you to try harder. And so, all else being equal, optimists tend to succeed more in different domains. Business, academia, sports. There are the negative parts, which is if you're overly optimistic, you're going to underestimate your risk, and then not take precautionary action. So not buy insurance when you need to. Not wear a helmet when you go on a bike.

MN: Um-hmm.

TS: And so it was thought that, well, okay, perhaps on balance the good just outweighs the negative. And so humans have evolved

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to have an optimism bias. However, what we discovered recently is that this optimism bias is not actually a permanent thing. It changes quite quickly with the environment. For example, we had a study where we brought people into our lab and we wanted to stress them out and they were undergrads. So in order to stress them out, we told them, "You're going to have to give a speech about a topic that we will give you. We're going to judge you. We're going to rate you. And then we're going to videotape it. Put it on YouTube. And what we found is that when people were under stress, immediately they started being hypervigilant to any kind of negative information and integrating that into their beliefs. They kind of lost their optimism bias for that amount of time. Then they went home, they got back to like, their relaxed state, and optimism bias came back. You know, it's highly likely that this explains the ups and downs of the market where people overestimate up, but then they also overestimate down. So when the market is starting going up, people become really up. They have a high optimism bias. So they overestimate the market. But then when the market starts going down quite drastically, people get

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extremely stressed. That changes the way that they process information. And actually can cause them to be overly pessimistic, creating the overreaction in the other direction as well.

MN: Thinking kind of more broadly now actually about this idea of anxiety and, and stress, there's this view I think that still people sort of have, which is that there's decision making and it, that is using rational attributes, and calculating something or other in an Excel spreadsheet, and then you come out with a good answer, and then anytime you have any emotion at all, you're messing it up. Your work really suggests that's, that's not the right way to think about decision making as this separate buckets, and one is good and one is bad.

TS: Yeah. It's a bit weird to think about emotion as something that we just happen to have, and we shouldn't have it. I mean, we have eyes to see, that's not a coincidence. We have like, ears to hear. And, and we have emotion probably because it gives you

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really good information. Now, nothing is perfect. Even what we see, right, is not, not always what reality actually is. So we don't have any system, or any principle in psychology or neuroscience, that's always a hundred percent accurate. But emotion, it helps us make decision, right? It's part of the decision making. There's no two things. There's no rational part of our brain, and our emotional part of our brain. They're all kind of interconnected, But I mean all that being said, it is important to remember that we can identify those situations where our biases, or even our emotions, tend to take us in the wrong direction, you know?

MN: And so, advice on sort of how to think differently about the decisions we make? Or what do you do in your life differently because of this knowledge that you have?

TS: Um-hmm. I think the one thing that I find is most helpful in this knowledge is that if you know how other brain works, that means you're so much better at communicating advice, information, and helping other people make decisions,

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which is much easier than helping yourself make a decision, but not less important because, you know, we are communicating information, and helping others all the time, whether it's your kids, your family, people you work with, your students. If you know some of these basic principles of how the mind/brain works, that's extremely helpful in, in interacting with people, which is what we do all the time.

MN: I like this idea of thinking about like a commitment contract with another person where [laughs] you can call them out on theirs and they can call you out on yours, because it's so much easier to see, often, in somebody else than in yourself. It's a little counterintuitive that you'd think you'd, like, be able to fix your own brain, but in fact it might be easier to have somebody else help you fix your brain.

TS: Yeah. So, so that's known as a bias blind spot, right? Emily Pronin from Princeton talks about it a lot. So it's really easy for us to see the overconfidence of other people. The overoptimism of other people, not so much in ourselves.

MN: These thoughts that you have on both looking at ourselves a little more carefully, thinking about

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what we're learning from, and what we're not learning from. And then also thinking about looking at others and helping them maybe learn from the things that they do as well, I think, is a really helpful perspective. [music starts] So thank you so much for joining us.

TS: Thank you, Mike. My pleasure.

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MN: Ok. So after talking with Dan and Tali, I'm thinking, Allison, you should probably be a little bit more optimistic about flying. And I'm wondering if you could bring yourself to not tap the plane the next time you board a flight.

AS: You know if I don't tap the plane something terrible is gonna happen. And I don't think you want that on your conscience.

MN: [laughs] I don't think I do either. But, we do know that a lot of these biases are, we kind of know they're not really gonna help but we have such a desire for this control over our outcomes that sometimes we sort of fall victim to them anyway. And then other times, of course, we don't even realize that we're falling victim to them. We just are carrying on with our lives and tapping until someone points it out to us.

AS: Yeah.

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Absolutely.

MN: Another point I really liked was Tali's idea that pretty much everybody is optimistic, meaning that we tend to update our view of the world when good things happen. But when bad things happen we're good at discounting them and completely not paying attention to them. Which, when it comes to money and investing, can really set us on a dangerous course.

AS: Right. But then it's also fascinating to hear how in moments of high alert, like, in a financial crisis, we become hyper-vigilant and overly pessimistic. So if a market's crashing, we tend to overreact to that bad news.

MN: And it's really hard to see that behavior in ourselves when we're doing it, partly because when it comes to market behavior, when we look around, everyone else is doing the same thing. And that's another thing that Tali mentioned that I really liked, which is like, my biggest takeaway from everything she told us, which is we're much better at seeing biased behavior in other people than in ourselves. So maybe we can make deals between us and another person and we can both point out the other person's biases and help each other that way.

AS: So why don't we make a deal right now. I will tell you when you're being completely unrealistically optimistic about your life.

MN: And I'll do the same for you

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until we are no longer speaking to each other. [laughter]

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AS: Talking Green is an original podcast from TD Ameritrade and T Brand Studio at The New York Times. Learn more about irrationality and money at NYTimes.com/TalkingGreen.

MN: And subscribe to Talking Green now so you don't miss a single episode. Join us next time as we explore how the way we think about money is ingrained in us by the people who raised us.

BK: Even as a young child I was sort of watching how nobody had money in my family and came from like generations of lower income. And just designing my life at an early age to not be like that.

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MN: I'm Mike Norton.

AS: And I'm Allison Schrager.

MN: Thanks for listening.

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[silence]

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