Boston Book Festival; WGBH Forum Network; Dan Ariely and Mark Moffett: Bugs in the System

Good morning everyone. I'm Debbie porter. I'm the founder of the bossom Book Festival when I welcome you to today and I'm glad to see you all here. Feel free to contribute. It's a little early in the morning to be super psyched about the festival that maybe later you will want to donate $10. I want to thank the Plymouth Rock Foundation for its generosity in sponsoring today's session on bugs in the system. This is one of the ones I've been looking forward to the most. Not just because my friends Dan Ariely and Mark Moffat are presenting but because I think it's going to be a super session. Now I'd like to introduce our host for the session comedian radio and TV personality and former Rhodes scholar. Faith Sally. Thank you ALL. Hello. Welcome to bugs in the system. You are about to meet two fantastically entertaining and compelling scientists. DAN ARIELY And Mark Moffat whose respective work does indeed focus on bugs. Dan.

Puts humans under a microscope to reveal the bugs in our motivations and choices. And Mark unearths literal bugs specifically ants to introduce us to a complex civilization over which we usually blindly tread. Beyond the buggy sematic wordplay that unites these two scientists today there's another connection between Dan and Mark. They say that they share a storyteller's. They're both about to open your eyes dramatically to what's in US and around us and under us Dan highlights how the irrational behavior of people and you will find that that includes you and me. In fact surprises us but maybe it shouldn't he suggests and Mark introduces us to the behavior of ants critters. We pretty much overlook unless they're really driving us crazy and suggest maybe they should surprise us with their amazing societies. So let me start by introducing you to Mark Moffit aka Dr. Boggs aka the Indiana Jones of Entomology the Jane Goodall of

ants. He's been called all those things and more. He's a research associate at the Smithsonian. A Harvard Ph.D. who studied with E.O. Wilson a regular contributor to National Geographic and a regular straight man on the Colbert Report. His new book is called Adventures Among Ants. And I will add that I recently had the pleasure of venturing into the Bleijie and jungle with Mark on assignment for CBS Sunday Morning. He will be prominently featured on a on a piece on that show and the next I hope month or so. And I have. Witnessed him. Not only getting bitten by countless ants but I've also seen him bite the heads off the ants so I can't chew them and swallow them so I can vouch for his embrace of the subject. Without further ado Marc Moffet. Thanks for coming out here I'm going to introduce And so I'm

not going to go into the for addictively or predictably irrational side of ants because we need to be introduced to them first. Maybe we can talk about any number of things afterwards. But see how this works. When to talk about a number of things that are interesting about ants and basically to me what fascinates me about ants among a number of other things is the fact that they are more like people than we expect. We keep being told that the comparisons to chimpanzees but in fact modern human societies are much more like large and societies than they are like chimpanzee societies. Only ants and humans have to worry about things like market economy situations traffic rules and highways moving around infrastructure and dealing with things like warfare. So I'm going to start off with a simple example it's kind of curious there is in fact a range of ancient societies it's for some reason rather similar

to the range of human societies in size. So there are groups of answers species that have societies of up to maybe a dozen or so individuals like a hunter gatherer group might have in humans and there are species that have several million individuals in a society like a city state or humans and across the range you see a lot of power patterns in common. These don't necessarily have to do with the intelligence. And in fact they certainly don't. But the way societies have to be organized to deal with problems depending on how big they are. One of the commonalities is speed and if you've ever seen. Been to say Times Square in New York you may notice all those people from visiting out of town that are just stunned by how fast everything is in fact things are even faster in Boston in terms of walking speed. I believe the New York and things accelerate to societies get bigger and bigger and both ants and humans. The smallest societies

include this species this is the mother and it covers itself with mud and they move at a glacial pace and this particular species we discovered actually does appropriate behavior to hunt snail So this picture shows a snail making a dramatic left hand turn as it attempts to escape a small mud and slow mo and as societies get bigger and bigger and Anth things accelerate. So the answer to invade your picnic are usually moving pretty fast. You go down to Central America and you see the army ants they're moving at supersonic speeds it seems. And what actually happens is that information is gained as societies get bigger and bigger. There's less self-reliance and the money out works on its own to catch and snail. And more information has changed between individuals as they're flowing past each other so in this situation in Africa these answer actually checking each other out constantly and

they will actually be able to detect as they pass other individuals what each other and is doing that day whether it's forging for food or helping raise the babies or building the nest. And on the basis of gathering this information as they go through the swarm of other ants they can pick what they're going to do for the day. So the ant colony self adjusts in terms of the kinds of actions that need to be done at a mass scale. Humans simply learn from each other in a small village. We know who we're going to see at the coffee shop in the morning. We know basically what's going to happen there's no big gain and type-A behavior. But in a place like Boston you can be running around and seeing all kinds of things even a lecture on irrationality and ants. So there's a lot more to be gained for going faster. Another thing about small societies and ants is that the self-reliance I mentioned before actually shows up in the way the ants perform work. They actually are able to do

individuals in a small group all of the tasks in the society. We're not talking about the queen is the reproductive we're talking about the workers. And one of the things that happens is that the workers actually in many cases end up with a tool chest. And this is a species that actually has a bear trap built into its face to catch prey and a separate set of jaws down there to do other kind of tasks. It's sort of a Swiss Army Knife ants and this kind of behavior is traditional If they're not into alcohol and too much unlike many other species that enjoy it very much and take their pleasure in working for the group. And they are workaholics to some extent. We'll talk about that later. But the work that they do in small societies is diverse. They can handle just about everything as societies get bigger you get more and more specialists we see that in human societies. Small town may need just a few jobs a big city may need hundreds or thousands of types of jobs it's the

same in an ant colony and you can actually tell the jobs well you know if you walk around Boston you can tell like a guy with a hardhat and so forth is probably a construction worker or someone with a briefcase in a dark suit might be a lawyer and so forth. As you can tell the jobs they do by their size and shape they're actually born as adult and to a certain size and they maintain that size for life and each size is built to do different kinds of work. And some of these larger societies. So this is the species I studied for my thesis that has the greatest range of sizes in any ant society. This is a minor work up here in the head of a major or a soldier and and a soldier weighs about 500 minors and what do the soldiers do. Well one thing they do they have a number of tasks but one thing they do is they carry around a young ones like a school bus. They're not actually the young ones the small ones. So here is one carrying about 15 ants. And not to school it turns out but out to the battlefield or back to that in a minute. Here's another case of a

specialized and so one that faith is now seen. This is the most specialized of all this is the army ant. And if you go down to Central America you see army ants moving along and their blazing speed. You'll notice along the edges of their highways these soldiers with enormous jaws and you can ask yourself well what could a soldier do with such long jaws just keep track of how long those jaws there and this is my finger. And those things are biting down to the bone and they actually have fishhook tips that they can't extract their own jaws it's a form of suicide. They're specialists in attacking entomologists and other tourists hear the other ants in the same society as a soldier and then you have successively smaller ants and the great thing is that as societies get bigger you get more teamwork in assembly lines. This is true in humans in and societies again. So these societies of army ants are enormous. And here we have the smaller

size and the soldiers of the sub major. And this is the media back here and turns out they're chopping up their army and so they kill a lot of things. Here's a nice yummy piece of cockroach they're carrying home and the smaller ants cannot pick it up it's too big for them. Eventually one of the more rare sub Meijers with the yellow head comes along lifts up the weight and one of the smaller ants has its role. Come right into play. It picks up the trailing end and keeps it from dragging. So they work as a team to get the food back efficiently. Now the smallest chance of all in this society we didn't know what they did until very recently the very see because it turns out that their job is to lay down in potholes in the trail and serve as living road. Phil there's one in this picture you may not have noticed it's underneath the other ants and they're simply running over it. Makes a nice smooth highway. Now in smaller societies teamwork and working together in general is more difficult. And I actually wonder in humans whether our past which has come from smaller groups

is one of the reasons we have all these kind of aberrations in the way we deal with the world. Here's an ant that lives in a smaller society and it is not very capable of working together to carry back the food. In fact these two are carrying back a caterpillar and they've struggled against each other so much that they've wrung out all the juice from the caterpillar it's turned into a little rag and two flies are dead. Dive bombing the remaining juices to steal them. So by the time they get home there may be no nutrients left in there. Now the ultimate team work an assembly line and so are the leaf cutter ants these have societies of millions and they carry back leaves. And just to give you an idea of some of the parallels this is an excellent example if you go down to Latin America you'll see them. They can carry back literally a single calling can bring back tons of leaves a year but they do not eat leaves they turn it into a mulch on which they grow a fungus which is a fully domesticated fungus that only lives with the ants the ants control its genetics. They do

vast monocultures of the stuff just like modern human societies with our monocultures and they do this with an assembly line that turns the leaf and food. And for the fungus and actually applies to pesticides. Weeds out all other fungus everything you can think that human farmers do. The ants do with their fungus the most primitive that these ants actually have much smaller gardens and they have some guy that can escape to nature and they're very much like the early human agricultural us who would like take things from nature and those things were grown in small gardens and they were genetically robust and didn't need to be tended very much and they didn't suffer from diseases. These ants do the same thing they take fungi from nature they can reach those fungus I can grow back to nature. They don't have to deal with all the problems of modern agriculture it's only after we domesticated these crops that we ended up with all these difficulties of keeping out pests diseases potato blight and so forth and the ants now have to do the same thing.

So the size of societies the also affects the infrastructure that they use so large ant societies actually have highways and this is a view from the air of the leaf cutter ants highways which can be a foot wide. These are palm trees all through here. These are the nest which can be 40 60 feet across and go down 30 feet and how Awesomes of chambers intricately organized. And I'm going to end with a couple of thing warfare because only ants and humans have warfare and we've both done it as their societies have gotten larger societies and the ants have a kind of in this case the honey pot and a kind of ritualized battle they don't go straight at the jugular. They check each other out and they circle each other in this species to see who's biggest. So the ants watch each other and the ones that are actually is demonstrating something called tactical deception it's only supposed to be in intelligent animals like

primates and humans. It's actually standing on a pebble to look bigger than a bigger ant. It's cheating in other words and there are all kinds of rules in battlefields in terms of who gets killed the smaller cheaper labor these little ants get chopped up pieces here by an enemy. This is a termite soldier that's actually you can see parts of ants all over the place. The small cheap later labor moves forward fastest gets killed and the big ants the soldiers arrive only when it's safe. The colony is invested a lot in them and smashes and kills the enemy. In this case that term right soldier. Anything you can think of and seemed to have done first in terms of military strategies and here is a ant that actually has a a. It's a suicide bomber and it's from Borneo it actually is the orange one here it actually ruptures its body when it contacts the enemy and spews a toxic yellow glue everywhere killing both of them in a Tablo

and these warfare baby behaviors become more important as societies grow bigger and bigger in the largest battlefields ever recorded are now in California with groups of up to trillions of ants colonies that cover hundreds of square miles battling in front particularly around San Diego that go on for miles with millions dying a day. These are invasive species that for a particular reasons have lost the capacity to stop fighting. And they've developed super colonies that are basically taking over the world they're making a bad name for other ants. Ants in general actually know and when you look inside the site societies we see all sorts of aggression all the time. But inside the societies there are. There's even a kind of devotion. They are very united in their developing the young here they are the brood chambers and working together. And that's the other side of the flip side of the ant societies there's aggression between groups and a total devotion within groups that's even more remarkable than humans.

And this allows them to work together in very unusual ways. And secondly connecting one tree to the next they actually do this with their bodies they actually linked together. So the other amps in the colony can run over them. This living ridging collect food on the other side and come back with it. This has to be the worst job in the ant colony because you're stuck there looking at the rear end of another ant all day. And it also this total devotion to the group also means that they have a total commitment to the society including the capacity to kill themselves at a moment's notice for the common good including in this case a whole bunch of ants deciding that they don't like me stepping on their colony which is this is my foot here this is how I usually look in the field I believe you remember this. So that's a little mini view of ants. Thanks sent.

Something I learned from Mark Moffet if you are in the field and decide to disrupt the home of millions of ants it's a good thing to have duct tape with you because Mark taught me to put duct tape around the top of my socks and my ankles because that helps you you know avoid getting bitten by ants a little bit. We still emerge bloody. Yes that simply means that you only start getting bitten by the time they swarm of your whole body to your neck instead of by the time they reach your feet. So it gives you about three more extra minutes of work. And as a feminist I would like to point out I am pretty well versed in ants now thanks to Mark all the answer you just saw were lady ants. Right Mark. Yes. Answer all female societies there are in fact sisterhoods males really don't have much to say in ant civilizations. They exist for one purpose only and that purpose requires that they stay alive for a day or two and then keel over and die. They seem to die happy without one purpose but they don't participate in social life.

We might pick that up a little bit more. When we have our discussion but right now I would like to introduce you to Dan Ariely. He is the author of The New York Times best seller Predictably Irrational The Hidden Forces that Shape our decisions and the Upside of Irrationality the unexpected benefits of defying logic at work and at home. Dan is the James B Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University where he holds appointments. Oh I meant to ask you how to pronounce is where you hold appointments at the Co-op. You don't want to mess up that word. Fuqua School of Business the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience the school of medicine and the Department of Economics. You're ubiquitous You're like the Ryan Seacrest of academia. He is also I love this. Dan is also a founding member of the MIT Center for Advanced Hindsight. Which is a real. Center which is awesome.

Dan. So let me start by saying that I have one of Mark's picture hanging in the in our lab the picture of the and carrying the big leaves. You gave it to me a few years ago and I use it for whenever students complain about how hard they are working to give them back. So I thought you know what. When the church I do lots of research on bugs and human thinking but I thought an appropriate topic for this particular setting will be to talk about cheating lying so you know if you open the newspaper you realize this is all around us and the question is what do we know about cheating and lying. How does it how does it work. And people often have the view that this is about some bad apples right or some individuals made off. I mean you can think whatever you want that kind of really plot to steal and cheat and the rest of us are really just kind of wonderful. And the question is is this really a good view of human nature. It's actually quite important distinction because if you say if

it's all about bad apples that's all we need to do is to have better age our processes so we don't hire bad apples. But if all of us have the capacity to cheat then maybe we need to think differently about how we organize the workplace government and so on. So to look at this we started by very simple experiment. Imagine you were part of my experiment I would give you a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems and they would tell you that they would give you a dollar per question you solve. I would pass this around and I would say you have five minutes solve as many questions as you can. A dollop of questions. So you would work as hard as you can at the end of the five minutes I would say stop. Shred the piece of paper eliminate all evidence and tell me how many questions you got correct. Now you have a chance to cheat. Now what you don't know is when you shred the piece of paper in the shredder only shreds the size. Besides I know how much you really solved. So what happens.

People solve for problems but they report to be solving six. And it's not as if there's a few bad apples. We find that that lots and lots of people are cheating just by a little bit. And it turns out that people not only cheat by a little bit they also feel comfortable with themselves. How does it work the way we understand it is that people try to accomplish two goals. We try to view of ourselves as honest wonderful honorable people and we also try to benefit from cheating. Now you could say how can you do both. You're either honest or you cheat. Well it turns out that as long as we cheat just a little bit we can do both. We can benefit from cheating just a little bit and at the same time we can keep ourself viewing our self as honest wonderful people. We call this the fudge factor. This idea that there's a range in which we can be dishonest and still think of our self as good as good people. How would you check something like this. How what kind of test would you do. The first thing we want is to find out how do we shrink the fudge factor and how do we expand the

fudge factor. How do we get people to eat less and how do we get people to cheat more. So the idea how to get people to cheat less came to us from a little joke I'll give you the Jewish version of this joke. A guy goes to the rabbi and he said Rabbi you wouldn't believe what happened last week. I came to synagogue or sitting there and when I left the synagogue I realized that somebody stole my bike. The rabbi said this is terrible somebody stealing your bike from synagogue. I'll tell you what you do next week when you come sit in the front row. And as we go over the Ten Commandments look around look back. Look at the audience. And when we get to thou shall not steal. See who can look you in the eyes. I know this is the person who probably stole your bike. The guy is very excited the rabbi is very excited with the idea. He does this. The rabbi catches him after services. So did it work. The guy said Rabbi you wouldn't believe it. It worked like a charm. The moment we got to doubt shall not commit adultery. I remember why I left my bike.

Now was the experiment and this we went to UCLA and we asked 500 undergrads to try and recall the Ten Commandments. None of them could remember all ten. Some of them invented interesting new ones which actually is an interesting question right when you ask people what should there be in the Ten Commandments. It's interesting what people invent But anyway what happened afterwards. We just asked them to recall the Ten Commandments. They failed but still then we counted them to cheat what happens. Nobody cheats. No it wasn't as if the people who remembered more commandments did less than the people remember. Commandment cheated cheated more. Nobody after even trying to recall the Ten Commandments cheats. In fact even when we take self declared atheists and ask them to swear on the Bible and then we give them a chance to cheat. They don't cheat afterwards so it's not so much about God it's about the fact that when we get people to think about their own morality they seem to be cheating less.

We also did it with the honor code. We are students here at MIT to sign in on a cause. I understand that the Shotover falls under the MIT honor code. Then they shredded it. No cheating whatsoever and not cheating whatsoever despite the fact that MIT doesn't have an honor code. That the students were just signing something that had no meaning. But nevertheless they didn't cheat. We actually ran the same experiment also at Princeton Princeton has a very strong honor code. They take the freshmen and they got us give them a week long crash course on morality lectures that a cappella group has some songs about morality all kinds of things about this. We waited two weeks after they finished this crash course on morality and we tempted them to steal money from us in the same way. What do you think happened. They steal less than MIT students. Just the same when you got them to sign the honor code. None of them cheat. When we didn't get them to sign the honor code both of them to the same degree. Now it is kind of good news bad news right. It

says that the good news is that when you remind people about their own morality they don't seem to cheat. The bad news is that one week long crash course and morality doesn't seem to work very well if you try to create a social change in terms of how honest or not honest people would be. It's unlikely to be a one weeklong course that would be effective. We took this idea by the way to the IRS. So we said look here's what we find. We find that when people sign on the top then they don't cheat so much. Think about all the forms of the IRS you've finished filling all the form and then you sign you've finished cheating by that time right. It's over. You're not going to fill out the form and then at the end that's all I have to say. Let me go back and revise what I've done already. So why don't we move the signature to the top. And they said well you know it's illegal. You can't you can't people have to sign. Afterwards we said well if people signed twice before and after they said that's confusing we said what if the first

item on the tax return was would you give some money to a task force to fight corruption. So that's one achieve two goals. First the people sign it. Not only have they signed something they also have to take an action that giving money to to a task force that would create even an increased commitment to honesty. Plus we said if they don't want to give this $25 you can order them. And when they don't talk to us anymore. But we did this experiment with the insurance company an insurance company that sends people letters asking them to declare all kinds of information what do we find when people sign on the top versus on the bottom there's a big difference about 15 percent difference in the extent to which people people cheat exaggerate the cost. OK. So this was all about getting people to cheat less. How do we remind people about their own morality and get them to Chiclets. How do we get people to cheat more. Not as a life goal but just to think about a little bit. The question get here also came from a little joke and the joke is that little Johnny comes back from

school with a note from the teacher that says that Johnny stole a pencil from the kid who is sitting next to him and Johnny's father is furious said Johnny I can't believe you did you. Never never never steal a pencil from a kid who's sitting next to you. You're grounded for three weeks and just wait until your mother comes. I don't know what your punishment will be but I'm embarrassed and humiliated. We never never never steal a pencil beside Johnny. His father said if you need a pencil you can just say something you could just ask. I can bring you a dozens of pencils from work. Now why. Why is this amusing because I think that we all kind of have the intuition that we will have a very hard time taking 10 cents from a petty cash box but we could easily take a pencil from work. Now why is that. I think it's to a large degree because the moment it's a pencil not money we can tell ourselves stories about it. We can say oh the workplace really wants us to take pencils or

everybody does. If I take a pencil and give it to my kid they would leave me alone and I could do a few more e-mails which will benefit the work. I mean there's lots of stories we can tell ourselves. In fact in another set of experiments we find that more creative people cheat more. Why. Because if you think about cheating is this ability to be honest but still convince yourself that we're honest people it's all about storytelling it's all about being able to convince ourselves that we're still good people while we're not. And if you're more creative you can just tell yourself. The stories about it you can justify more easily it's all about being able to rationalize lots of activities. So how did you test this pencil versus pen versus Cachay do you imagine that you do the same task that you described earlier. You have these sheets sheets of paper and in one case you give it to me and I pay you you say Mr. xponent I solved X problems give me X X dollars so you shred the piece of paper you ask me and I pay you in a second condition. You come and say Mr. experiment I

solved X problems give me X tokens I pay you money but I pay you in tokens and you take these tokens and you move 12 to the sides and change them to dollar. In a sense what happened is you're cheating for money for tokens and then become money you cheating for something else but it will not be something else for long it will very quickly turn out to be money. What happens people doubled their cheating in our experiments. This by the way for me is the most worrisome experiment because if you think about how society is moving away from cash to all kinds of other representation of cash that the more abstract stocks options mortgage backed securities. Think about all of those things that people could do with those more abstract removed modalities and mediums that might help people be dishonest. But at the same time keep on believing that there are moral just the experiment about getting people to be more dishonest We ask the question of what happens if you

get if you see an example of somebody who cheats in an egregious way. So imagine you sitting in a big room and all of a sudden there's somebody who cheats in an egregious way. I ask somebody to stand up after 30 seconds and say I solved everything. What do I do now. So you're all here. You are solving the first problem and somebody is saying that they solved 20. You can't believe that they're right and they get they stand up and you say you've got to solve everything. Take your $20 and go away. What happens now. Turns out lots and lots of people cheat more. But it turns out that if that person doesn't represent somebody from the in-group they look like somebody from an alt group the behavior is different. So we ran this experiment at Carnegie Mellon and the first condition the student who stood up had the Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt and everybody was a Carnegie Mellon student. Now cheating went up. But in the other condition this student was wearing University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt. Now when he stood up he was not telling people Look you can cheat here and get away with it he said. But by this

action he basically said that people from these other universities who cheat what happened now cheating didn't go up. It went down. So it means that when we see people from our in-group behaving immorally our understanding of what's OK and what's not OK changes. But when we see people from another group cheating all of a sudden it's like the Ten Commandments experiments that all cheating is involved. I don't want to be involved in this and people are less likely to do it. The final thought I want to share with you is a question about cultural differences. People always think that there's huge cultural differences in cheating. Let me just ask you how many people here grew up in a different country. What is your hint. OK. From all of those people who grew up in a different country how many of you think that in your home country people cheat more than the Americans. How many people here think that people who grew up in a different country in your home country people cheat less than Americans the same. OK. So you know most people when asked this question think that in their hometown in

their home country people watch it more than than Americans. With the exception of Canadians. So we tried this experiment in different countries. I grew up in Israel. I went to Israel I tempted the Israeli to cheat in the same way that you just like the Americans we went to Eataly talents just like the Americans British troops just like the Americans the Chinese just like the Americans and our task here is how we understand it right now and culture. There are cultural differences but what culture does is to take an activity and move it from the moral domain to a moral domain. Is cheating on your spouse cheating or not cheating. Different cultures have different answers for this cheating on your taxes cheating or not cheating. Different cultures have the answer for this. Is cheating any insurance company cheating or not cheating so what culture does is it basically take an activity from the moral domain to a non moral domain and the other way around. But when we deal with something in the moral domain like our task it turns out the similarity between

people is very high. We did find one cultural difference. We went to Washington D.C. We went to Boston congressional staffers hang out in and we tempted them to steal money from us in the same way and then we went to bars in New York where bankers hang out. And we tempted the bankers to steal money from us in the same way. Now who do you think she did more. The bankers or the politicians who votes for bankers who votes some politicians. OK. I was also I also thought that it would be the politicians. But actually it was the bankers two to one that. But but I should say that these were congressional staffers So these were kind of junior politicians. Maybe there's room for improvement. Thank you. I feel compelled to confess that this Pennis from my bank

but I do not feel like I'm cheating because everybody else does it. And I'm you know spreading the word about TV. I do have a price tag connected to the back of my dress as well. Just kidding. It was there. Did you find any differences at all. I mentioned gender with our friends. Any differences between men and women cheating. So you know it's interesting it's always women who ask this question you rephrase the question for we we actually don't find in any of our task we always measure it. We haven't found gender difference yet. It's interesting. Now again the way to think about it could be our task is kind of abstract like it could be that when you make the task much more embedded in the culture you would find a different abstract task in which you basically steal money from university. There's no different I just say one more thing you know we found. We tested about 20 thousand people we found about 10 bad apples people who the lot.

We found about. 14000 people cheated a little bit. And if you think about how much money we we lost on the bad apples it's about $150. If you think about how much money we lost and the good apples we be just a little bit. It's about thousand dollars just for the full range of activity in terms of what's blue collar crime when people plan and execute cheating versus kind of little cheating in the margin. But done by many many people. I have to ask what was the most interesting 10 commandments that somebody suggested oh somebody suggested I think about it. I haven't that I haven't looked at the list for a while. If I can remember. You know the sort of putative theme of this event is that and all of your book is that it's not punitive people are irrational. Dan's books are I feel like I'm on the home shopping network or something. But both of their books are amazing. Dan's books were so fascinating and

and he gives very specific amazing anecdotes about how irrational people are. And of course by the title predictably so and it's it's really interesting to find out how you can harness your own irrationality for you know beneficial reasons. But. Is it fair to say that ants are rational. MARK Well it's hard to say. The confusing confounding factors are the answer stupid. So that doesn't mean that they don't have things like personality and differences but in fact we and incense and ecology are probably stuck back in the pre-ban days of looking at ants and not really assessing individual choices in the sense that he is. But nevertheless ants probably in general function better as a group. And I think that's because they have a total nationality. They have a total devotion to the

in-group the colony and the way that humans don't they assess each other as calling members or not calling members and that's what really matters to an ant. They cannot leave the group they cannot defect to Canada that they can't do things like that so they they have through chemical cues just like the chemistry on the soles of your body. Cause a mune response if there's a mistake. That part of the body is treated as a parasite and absolutely form a group that's called a super organism. And because of that there's a unity of purpose. They don't have to deal with the fact that someone's wearing a University of Pennsylvania T-shirt or whatever you were saying within the colony. There are some conflicts sometimes in colonies but we don't know if there are rational or irrational. That's a tricky question. So would it be fair maybe to say that ants run completely on instinct which is analogous to rationality in humans. Well no actually no ants do have a lot of individual

differences that are actually for example despite the common belief. Busy as a bee there are ants that are inherently lazy they do very little all the time. There are other ants called Lead us which is probably not a very good word for. It's more like grudges who do most of the work they're like in your family there's probably someone who does the dishes every day even though they don't want to and there are amps that have a motivation to get things done and they try to oppress other ants to do the job. So there are differences among ants in which we could look for you know things like irrationality I suppose. Yeah. So if you think about Adam Smith economics if you on it is basically that if you have lots of factors and everybody's perfect is selfish. The invisible hand will kind of fix things. And if you think about the stock market you said the stock market is driven to Maliki if the stock market is driven by lots of people competing with each other not cooperating but this high level of cooperation is actually created by lots and lots of people each competing each trying to be selfishly maximizing them. It

looks to me like Antek might be the opposite. That the the size of the colony and the success of the whole is not based on competition but actually on pure cooperation is that it could be particularly in the larger colonies where you have this more of this mass action and this cooperation is manifested in all kinds of ways. I mean there's not a lot of individuality in terms of need and at Callie's for example one of the cool things is that the ants are regurgitate food like birds do to each other and as a result over time eat what's in your stomach. There's not one and out there is getting all the caviar and other it's having to survive on a crude potato mash all the ants in the calling end up with the same contents in their stomachs so there's an actual uniformity of what they all have and therefore what they all want and what the colony as a whole needs. And this certainly drives the colony to work in a way maybe a more functional manner. There's there's a parallel I'd like to draw it from if I'm right on my reading of both of your

respective works between something that you talk about Dan that humans do called hurting or self hurting and the way that would be H E R D I N G. Not that not cutting yourself. And and Mark about the way that ants know how to follow each other's trails with pheromones. So Dan when you talk about self hurting self hurting is that when we act a certain way we often don't remember why we acted in a certain way. You buy coffee somewhere you take a particular action and you spend a lot of money on wine. You don't remember exactly why you did that. Were you in a good mood and in particularly bad mood but you remember you did it and once you remember you did it when you come next to a situation you say to yourself. What did they do before and you say oh I remember what they did. I bought this wine I bought this coffee. It must have been a fantastic decision. I always make wonderful decisions. So this has to be one of those so let me let me do it again. So what happened is that you could get people to make one decision that deviates from their regular behavior.

And once you get them to do it once they think it's a representation of themselves and they keep on doing it over and over and over. It's basically the idea that we our memories better than our preferences. We remember what we've done and we tend to follow it over and over and over sometimes getting into a trap of long stream of bad behaviors is there. Can you draw a pair. And also you talk that self-heating but it's also hurting like if we're walking down the street and we see a long line of people. It's human nature to sort of get not what's going on. I want to get you to imagine there was a fire here and you saw everybody running in one way. Would you stop yourself and say hey let me see all my options and evaluate them. No you would have a tendency to run following everybody and actually does a lot of really set examples of these window buildings on fire. It's often the case that exits with nobody and exits. There were too many too many people. We just have this tendency to just run after other people whether we make sense or not. Do you see any parallels with the way that ants seemingly spontaneously

follow the same trail there one after another. Yeah. Well ants can. Choose between paths that make more or less sense and over time they tend to do that. But of course the fire situation probably arises in ants pretty often where they make the wrong choices and there's a mass response usually set down by chemical cues that say go this way and they don't build up. And all the ants follow a certain decision. The thing about ants is that they're acting through a kind of ignorance and a sense of something you're talking about because we don't know our own motivations we can rationalize and presumably can't. But no ants following these trails knows where it's going and why it's going there and throughout ant lives there is a total ignorance of the individual they can work out certain details. And I think they do have a little mind in there that probably understands certain things about the world but in terms of the whole colony it's entirely an emergent process. Everybody makes local decisions and through a mass action where the

ants go in a certain direction say succeed better survive better get there faster or find the best food and build up the most responses. The answer is a colony as a whole moves in the right direction but they also have the chaos of the moment which is why you're talking about their periods of transition where decisions can be wrong at this mass level. I want to open it up to a few questions from the audience before I do that quickly if it's possible what has surprised you the most about studying ants. Well what surprised me the most is the parallels with humans would suggest that there are organizational principles about living in large groups that don't have much to do necessarily with our intelligence. The fact is that a tiny group of hunter gather humans doesn't need a highway but it's bigger and bigger groups come about. All these things emerge that we think of as human and then we can study and ants in terms of their principles and impact perhaps those can apply to humans

because humans came from hunter gatherer groups or in a very awkward social situation here where we're living in millions when we haven't before. And that's kind of the curiosity we're learning how to do this for the first time. And Dan I feel like as a reader every page of your book surprised me. What surprises you the most. So one of the problems that concerns me the most is what's called self-control problems. You know there's lots of stuff that is fine right now but not so good in the future. Think dieting. Right. Not so much fun. Good for the future. Exercising not so much fun. Good for the future. Medical complaints a lot of problems are like this and it turns out we are failing those problems repeatedly. Every time that it's now versus later we don't seem to be good at the later. I've done a lot of research on this. The thing that surprised me the most is it is a result that came out two weeks ago. Let me ask you how many people here have ever texted while driving how many people are lying right now.

Texting while driving is one of those examples right. When you look at it you say how stupid could we get. You know we risk our lives dramatically increase the chance of dying because of momentary excitement with the vibrating phone that we just want to answer. Here's the thing. Some states including here have passed a law with texting and driving is illegal. What do you think happened in those states. Accident rates because of texting and driving have gone up. Why. Because before the law was passed people were texting while driving. After the laws are passed people still text while driving but they do it under the wheel. No limit to human stupidity. So that's not surprising. There's no limit to our stupidity. Please anyone has a question. There's a mike right there. Please sir do you want to hop up and hit the mike place. Thank you. Two questions. Number one is that the speaker a bit louder or closer.

I guess the question about and Aunty's. You know in the case of human society it seems to be the ticket that drives the expansion of the kind of complexity of society and large Kamini. You know the population is you know once the resolution can hold in the case of ons you talked about this you hunter gatherer Bronson's there's a metro police advance. What are what caused those difference. And also you know by listening to those you know Walker share the same genetics and that. Helps out the more more eyes way of the life that they seem to lead. OK. Can you repeat the question. I'm not sure I understood the question. If I got it all I heard the part about the role of the shared genetics. And I think that certainly the fact that ant colonies tend to be tightly genetic groups in fact families certainly helps out. But we're finding more and more that there are ant societies including these huge ones in California that are held together beyond rational bounds. There are trillions of individuals that couldn't possibly

meet each other that are hundreds of people apart and still are unified. So really it's a kind of nationality it's the in-group versus the outgroup and in human societies or in an outgroups even within a nation which makes things much more complex by the way human beings making an in-group is really easy. If I took you in I called the people on the right blue and the people on the left read and I gave you the right T-shirts in two minutes the people in blue would think that you're morally superior to the people in red and the other way around it turns out that it's really easy. It works for every color so that it's really easy to do. And of course it's really important. Do you have questions or. Come on up. Hi thank you very much niceness. Wonderful to hear as an undergraduate I was studying ants for a little bit leaf cutter ants and so it's fun to see this and to hear what you guys were saying about how paths will sometimes form randomly from really random movement and so strike it was striking for me to watch and see moving

and seemingly completely random directions and then suddenly there was a trail that starts forming and off they go. And I was wondering if maybe part of the parallel here between human nature and nature is maybe our brains working in a similar way this idea that sort of circuits in our brains appear as pathways from a seemingly random set of of neuron firings. I was just wondering if that sort of piece of psychology ever acted as a bridge between your fields. So the question is do our brains work in the same. So I think you know there's a very basic work of how neurons work which is if two neurons the path between them gets activated get stronger and stronger and stronger I think we're correct in that regard. But I think actually not so a big difference from Ansun is the neocortex is the new part of the cortex like if you think about the emotional part of the brain the basic instinctual part of the brain when you think about all the facts that get us to think deeply about stuff. That's a big difference. But what's interesting actually is that

this part that is kind of you know our progression over the rest of the animal kingdom is actually gets us into trouble often. First of all because often we make decisions based on our gut intuition based on our the emotional part of the brain and then we use the neocortex to explain why we did that. We do something and then we tell ourselves stories about why we did this it also leads us to all kinds of other things that will not do. So if you said who is more rational answer humans there's lots of stuff that our neocortex and our ability to think and so on and plan for the future actually gets us to make mistakes. They're much more instinctual and instinct have just been reacting to cost and benefit the environment than being honed in a much better way. Q But anything like oh just like a good example of parallels that might be in common or when we turn maybe much of our brain off on that. For example when we're walking around on sidewalks and masses and busy streets and all these patterns emerge or how pedestrians flow past each other and show some

of the same patterns. There is a case where these higher brain functions don't seem to play a role and yet as a whole in both cases the flow patterns are very efficient. We seem to move through narrow spots in a highway or trail in the same way and so forth. So they work without requiring too much of our brain. I just read about a study where Southwest Airlines wanted to find out if they should change their seating policy. And they hired someone to do an algorithm based on ant behavior to see what the best way to get a lot of bodies in a small like dispersed in a small space was I still hate boarding Southwest Airlines. Any other questions do you have one. Great. So it sounds like the answer I'm mainly concerned with the social good and not so much about their individual benefit but I'm curious how that plays out with the cheating and talking about trying to control cheating because what the 10 commandments. It sounds like they're sort of referencing this social guide. But. But at the same time

people didn't sort of optimize their own ability to cheat in general more than a certain thing. So what are the limits to sort of how people perceive cheating in terms of you know not cheating because of the social good versus you know because of some they might get caught. And how do you how do you use that. Is it better to try to to try to say you shouldn't cheat because it will hurt society or because you'll get in trouble. So am I. Hi David. So. So the way we think about it is that people are not rational when they cheat. I mean I described a very gloomy picture about people cheating but the fact is people cheat much less than they would if you were just perfectly selfish. Right if you're walking around here and you knew that you would never be caught. And there was a wallet somewhere. The rational thing to do is to take it and go home. There's a good chance you wouldn't do it. So people cheat less than they would if they were perfectly rational. People give to charity more than they would if they were perfectly rational by the way. When we go around

university and we ask people to give to charity which students do you think give the least people who left which class economics right. I mean we just taught them to be selfish and that's the right thing to do and that's what they do. So what happened with cheating is that it's about socialization it's about learning about how to play with others it's learning about social utility. The name for caring about others in economics its social utility. We do care about others in a way that is not described in the rational system and that's what gets us to care. And this is not to cheat. We incorporate the well-being and the well-being of how to not perfectly. We're not willing to often die in the same way and we're just about Social Security. We have a component of selfishness a component of of of social activity. Can I say one last thing. Sure. We're getting close to the election season so I will tell you something about politics. We together with Mike Norton we just did a study we asked people Americans there was this philosopher called John rolls

and John Roll said it's a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it you would be willing to entertain the random place. Well if you're rich you know. No wonder you want the wealth distribution that is very skewed if you're poor of course you don't want it. Ross said well if you don't know where you're going to enter into society what kind of wealth distribution do you want to have. How much of the wealth you want to be owned by the rich and how much do you want to buy the poor what's called what's called the GINI coefficient. So we asked about 6000 people how do you want wealth distribution if you didn't know where you were going to enter society. So imagine you have a distribution of wealth like in Sweden a distribution of wealth like in the U.S. and you say if you didn't know where where you would end up. Which one would you like. 92 percent of Americans prefer Sweden. But what's more interesting is that when we break it by Republicans and Democrats for Democrats 93 percent for Republicans it's 19 1/2 percent. So what it tells me is that I think when you dig deep down and you ask where we are in terms of

human values Republicans and Democrats are actually quite similar. It's when you obscure deep human values and you start calling different names and you have politics and you have different terminology for different things. Then we start believing that we're actually more different in each other and I'm hoping that you know political season will become more about our beliefs and just kind of superficial labeling something very optimistic. Mark we haven't heard from you for a while so just final word. I'm sure everyone wants to know this what is the head of an ant take. If it's a little nutty and now you are I think that's a good find. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Dan Ariely and Mark Moffett. There. Are books are available for sale by Brookline Booksmith which is just outside the Google pavilion. And Dan is pre-signed some books Mark will be signing them in real time. I love the link you made

between creativity and cheating. It makes me think that a lot of the authors here at the book festival are you can tell when you're at the Boston shooting first of all the way it's called. Thank you very much have a wonderful day by the blog