The Psychological Power Of Expectations - David Robson

David Robson is an award-winning science writer specialising in the extremes of the human brain, body and behaviour. Our expectations have a profound effect on the outcomes we get in life. This isn't positive vibes from The Secret, this is one of the most replicable, robust effects that impacts pretty much everything we care about to do with our lives and health. Expect to learn how people with no gluten intolerance can have a gluten reaction after eating a meal with no gluten in it, why the drones at Gatwick were probably imagined, why French people eat worse than Americans but live longer, how your thoughts are more important than your genes when it comes to athletic performance and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 30% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/modern (use code: MODERN30) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Buy The Expectation Effect - https://amzn.to/3NzBIKh Check out David's website - https://davidrobson.me/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #psychology #placebo #health - 00:00 Intro 01:26 Expectation Effect & Placebo Effect 07:33 How the Mind Imitates Illness 16:19 Applying the Placebo Effect 27:40 Expectation Effect on Sleep & Ageing 33:49 Why Do These Effects Exist? 41:26 Does Willpower Deplete? 51:38 Contagious Expectations 58:44 Applying the Expectation Effect 1:04:41 Where to Find David - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So the scientists have just kind of done these experiments where they gave these people foods that didn't contain any gluten or wheat, but they told them it did, and they still experienced all of the symptoms. That shows us that their symptoms aren't imagined, they really were experiencing them. But it's like the kind of opposite of the placebo effect, the expectation that they will become ill makes them feel the symptoms.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  David Robson, welcome to the show.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  How did you get interested in the way that expectations can impact our lives?

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Like, I guess, like, as a medical writer, I've kind of known about the placebo effect for ages. But then I just, like, over the last five years, I've just seen, like, such an abundance of research that had kind of moved beyond, like, you know, the effects in hospitals, but to, like, all other areas of our lives. So, you know, like, there is, you know, some great research on these kind of weird psychogenic illnesses that pass between people just through expectations, but then also, like, research looking at the way our expectations shape our performance at the gym, like, how we respond to sleep loss, even like how quickly we age. And it was actually that finding, I just felt like I have to write this book now, because it's like, it's actually cutting people's lives by like seven and a half years. Like, if you have this negative view of aging, if

• 1:17Speaker 00

  you see it as this kind of period of inevitable decline. And that just seems so profound, it felt like actually, you know, you could do a lot of good by telling this story, basically.

• 1:26Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference between the expectation effect and the placebo effect?

• 1:31Speaker 00

  So the placebo effect is like one type of expectation effect. And so that is like, I guess, most people are familiar with it, but that's very much like if you have high expectations that a treatment is going to be effective, even if it's a dummy treatment, then you will see some kind of alleviation of your symptoms. So that's been researched for like five decades, you know, like, there's no longer any controversy over that. But the expectation effect is kind of much more general. So this is looking at how we create self fulfilling prophecies from our beliefs through like various mechanisms. So changes to our behaviour, changes to our perception, and changes to our physiology.

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  And that happens both positively and negatively, right? This isn't us just making things better, we can also make things worse.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think that's how it often manifests in our lives like day to day is that when we have these kind of negative expectations, we're like needlessly hampering our performance. We're like kind of limiting our potential essentially. So, um, so yeah, a lot of what I write in the book is actually just like asking people to reassess those negative expectations and just kind of bring it up to something that's a bit more objective or open minded. And even that can have a huge effect on your life.

• 2:42Chris Williamson?

  The problem is we have a negativity bias, right? We have a leaning generally towards negativity. We're vigilant for whatever might be lurking in the bushes of existence. And now that the expectation effect is something that we know about, that negativity bias bleeds into a reality negativity bias, right? We become a self fulfilling prophecy of the fears that we had previously.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly it. So it's like the, um, one of the researchers told me, and I totally believe this, that our expectations that we have today are kind of shaping our reality tomorrow. So, you know, like they are actually shaping the way we perceive the world, but also kind of physically what's happening to our bodies. Um, but like you said, we have this negativity bias. I think like in our culture, we often see like being pessimistic as being inherently more rational or kind of smarter, you know, it's smart to be cynical. But often we're just needlessly negative. Actually, our kind of pessimistic expectations are no more rational than if we were like a kind of Pollyanna figure who was always being like totally optimistic about everything, you know? So yeah, that's why I think we have to find that sweet spot where we're not like raising our expectations

• 3:48Speaker 00

  to be kind of wishful thinking, but we're just kind of asking objectively, could I see this situation, um, kind of more positively, essentially?

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

  You looked at the expectation effect and diet, right?

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So that's one of my favorite examples. Um, and like this is another way I try to kind of differentiate the expectation effect from just like positive thinking, you know, like bullets, like, um, The Secret where you kind of, you're told to just imagine yourself being like super skinny and like you will just become super skinny. Um, like that's totally not going to happen. But what the scientific research shows is that it's much more about our kind of specific expectations of the food we're eating.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  And so when we're kind of dieting, um, we're so focused on like the kind of sense of deprivation and like, you know, all the calories we're missing, that that actually kind of sets up the body for starvation. So it does things like increases the levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin that stimulates appetite. Um, and ghrelin also kind of slows your metabolism. So you burn fat more slowly, essentially. So if you're on a diet, you've got this mindset of deprivation. Um, you've got high levels of ghrelin that are kind of making you have hunger pangs and like reducing your metabolism. It's like a recipe for disaster. It's like gonna make your diet so much harder.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Um, so yeah, that was revelatory for me to just realise that actually, you know, very simply, kind of the kind of packaging we see around our diet foods are actually changing the way our body responds to the food.

• 5:16Chris Williamson?

  Is that language like low calorie snack and stuff like that?

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, all of that kind of thing. And, you know, like they, um, the scientists did this kind of linguistic analysis of kind of diet foods. And it's, it's not just like focusing on the low calories. It's also like, they miss out on all of the vocabulary that might help you to get pleasure out of food. So, you know, like if you have a high fat food, it's gonna be like, um, luxurious decadent, you know, like, um, uh,

• 5:42Chris Williamson?

  Creamy, tasty.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, creamy, tasty. They're gonna focus on all of the kind of sensory aspects. If you have a diet food, it's like sensible, which is like such a bland, horrible word. And then like that actually changes your hormonal response to the food, just by having that kind of language that sets you up to feel like you're depriving yourself.

• 6:02Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. So there is a balance, I suppose, for marketers that are doing food marketing between the, I guess, the conversion in terms of whether people are going to pick it up and then the enjoyment or the effectiveness of whether or not it actually satiates people a bit more. What was the, didn't you look at something to do with French people? Aren't French people supposed to be really fat and they're not?

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. Exactly. Cause they eat a lot of food that's kind of high in saturated fats. Um, so they should have higher levels of kind of cardiovascular disease, um, because of this. And yet they don't. They actually. You know, they like have lower BMIs, but also just lower rates of heart attacks compared to like America and the UK, even though we eat like fewer saturated fats. So that's kind of this mystery. But then you look at the French kind of whole attitude to eating, and they just don't feel this kind of guilt around what they eat that we have in the UK or US. So it's like there was this survey that asked, it was like word association and like, what do you associate with cream cake? And in France, it was like celebration, and in the UK, it was guilt.

• 7:09Chris Williamson?

  Regret, yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And so the idea here is that actually, if you're feeling like totally stressed about the food you're eating all the time, and you're missing out on all of that pleasure, that's like a major source of stress. And we know that stress itself can kind of contribute to ill health. So like, you know, day to day, you're not going to notice the difference. But over a lifetime, it can help to explain the differences between those cultures in terms of the kind of illnesses that they experience.

• 7:34Chris Williamson?

  What was that thing that you looked at to do with gluten and gluten intolerances?

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, this maybe is a bit controversial. So there are some people that definitely have a gluten intolerance, that there's just no question about that. It's like, the, you know, their body is responding to it. It's got a true allergic reaction. So I'm not questioning that. But like, I think recently, we've seen a lot of media coverage where people don't have like a celiac disease, but they're just kind of gluten sensitive or wheat sensitive. So, you know, about 30% of people now report that. And it's, you know, that has kind of increased from a couple of percent to 30% in like 10 years. It would be crazy if like our bodies are changing that quickly. And then so the scientists have just kind of done these experiments where they gave these people these foods

• 8:21Speaker 00

  that didn't contain any gluten or wheat, but they told them it did contain the gluten and wheat, and they still experienced all of the symptoms. So they were still having like the bloating or the diarrhea, like all of this stuff. So like, that shows us that their symptoms aren't imagined. Like, they really were experiencing them, but it's through an expectation effect. It's like the kind of opposite of the placebo effect. It's like the expectation that they will become ill makes them feel the symptoms. And that probably can explain the rise. Like, the essentially all the media coverage about wheat sensitivity is kind of making a lot of people ill.

• 8:57Chris Williamson?

  Wow. It's like a A psychological contagion in a way. And if you're hearing a lot of news stories about this is how bad gluten is for you. And this is how you're going to react. And this is how you're going to respond. And maybe you've got a friend who's got it as well. And it doesn't surprise me that that stuff happened, but it's so hilarious. It's such an interesting intersection, right? Because people don't have a gluten intolerance or they, they might not have as severe of a gluten intolerance as their body is responding to. However, they are suffering with the effects of a gluten intolerance. So it is, it is not quite the same as a placebo effect, right? It's, it's this, it's in some sort of no man's land in between the two.

• 9:42Chris Williamson?

  They don't have the problem, but they do have the impact, but they don't have it for the reason that they thought that they did.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly it. And I think actually like a lot of people find it quite offensive if you suggest it's kind of the origin is psychological rather than like purely biological. But actually like, I don't think that distinction makes sense anymore when we understand the mind body connection, because we know that like our expectations can change our physiology. So, you know, loads of other experiments have shown that's like, if you're expecting to kind of have a headache, that expectation then actually changes the release of like different chemicals in your brain that change the vasculature of, of your brain. So it's actually like changing the pressure that causes the headache. So if you take a kind of tablet and you expect to have a headache, um, like it's not the biological action that's going to give you that headache, but you're still going to feel

• 10:34Speaker 00

  the pain and it's still actually caused to change, you know, within the brain itself. It's still, it's like the words are biologically active rather than the pill you're taking essentially. And we're saying exactly the same thing with, um, the wheat intolerance. It's like the expectation is biologically active. It's not the food that you're eating that's actually causing that problem.

• 10:53Chris Williamson?

  I think the reason, and I could totally imagine if I had some illness or allergy of some kind that I've been dealing with for a long time, and then somebody comes in and says, well, this is potentially contributed to or worsened by your psychology. That makes you feel culpable. That makes you feel like it's your fault almost, and like you're in control. The reason that people like the idea of medicalizing, or at least it makes them feel more secure, is that by giving something a term, by branding it as something, it kind of makes it feel more realistic, more real, more medicalized, more scientific, and probably a little bit more like,

• 11:38Chris Williamson?

  it's not their fault.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I think like that's something that has been contributed to by like the medical profession in that like, I think a lot of doctors have this kind of assumption, actually, that if something's psychogenic, it's kind of not real, it's imaginary, you know, they have kind of assumed it's kind of malingering. So often like doctors can be quite rude when they present this diagnosis that something's psychogenic in origin.

• 12:04Chris Williamson?

  What does psychogenic mean?

• 12:05Speaker 00

  More upsetting. So that's just like if it's psychological in origin, essentially. So if it comes from like the brain, not from like a biological, direct biological action.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I mean, it's so damaging. And then like, so these people then feel very resistant to the diagnosis. They're not really going to be very positive about, say, having like a cognitive behavioral therapy to try to treat the psychogenic illness. So they're like stuck in this loop. It's actually much harder to treat them than it would be often to treat someone with a purely biological illness.

• 12:38Chris Williamson?

  No way. So somebody that's got a psychogenic gluten intolerance is potentially more difficult to treat than somebody who has a biologically driven gluten intolerance? That's, that's so interesting.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, and because there's like loads of other psychogenic illnesses that are like even more severe. So some people have like like some people have psychogenic blindness where they their brain has kind of fooled them into thinking that their eyes can't see. And then so they actually can't see like it's actually the brain is just blocking that sensory information from being processed consciously. And again, or paralysis even like some people have like paralyzed limbs. They're caused by like the expectation that it's been paralyzed somehow without a kind of biological damage, anatomical damage. And for those people, yeah, like it's really difficult then to try to get them to respond to treatment because

• 13:36Speaker 00

  it feels so insulting and there's such stigma attached to that, even though it shouldn't be because actually, you know, all of us are kind of experiencing these expectation effects to a greater or lesser degree. It's just like, you know, they're having a more extreme reaction than most people.

• 13:51Chris Williamson?

  One of the places that I noticed this in my own life was with fasting. So everybody knows the experience of being hungry and not having eaten. It's 2pm and you still haven't had any food in you or whatever. And you've got those hunger pangs, but after a bunch of different episodes with longevity doctors like Dr. David Sinclair and his colleagues, I realized that maybe that hunger signal is something that I'm actually seeking. Maybe that's something that's good for me. It's a hormesis stressor. It's going to activate telomeres and all of the other stuff that I can't remember. And that then reframed the experience of being hungry to me. I thought, actually, this is a signal that something's going right here. Like this is the input that I'm after. And yeah, okay, it's not

• 14:35Chris Williamson?

  wildly enjoyable, but it's not that bad. Just the sensation of being hungry without the narrative and the story around, oh, my God, I need to eat. My energy is going to be low, blah, blah, blah. I actually find that my energy goes up while I'm hungry. I find that I'm more alert. I find that my thoughts are quicker. And I think, oh, this is good for me. This is something that I'm supposed to be doing and I'm going to look forward to having my food in an hour's time or whatever.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's just like what the expectation effect is all about is this kind of process of reframing. So it's not about denying the feelings. It's not like you're telling yourself like, I'm not hungry, but you're just, you're reinterpreting those feelings and you're kind of telling yourself like, based on the science, that it's actually like a good thing for you. And so we see that with a lot of the other expectation effects that I discuss, like when people are working out at the gym, you know, like, some people really catastrophize like when they're kind of feeling tired, like during an endurance exercise and they, they see it as a sign of that their own fitness is, you know, kind of really poor, that maybe they're going to suffer a heart attack or something. And what you want to do is just kind of change that interpretation and be like, actually,

• 15:42Speaker 00

  like, you know, no pain, no gain. Like if it's, if I'm feeling uncomfortable, that's when I'm doing my body like the most good. And you can see that when people do interpret that, like it changes a bunch of things in the body, but especially like it, it kind of helps to encourage the release of the endogenous opioids that we have in the brain. So like the endorphins essentially that give you that run us high. Like when you reinterpret your feelings during a workout and realize that actually like the feeling of pain can almost be like a reward, you get those, like the release of those endorphins, it makes you feel good and it makes you want to come back to the gym afterwards. So.

• 16:18Chris Williamson?

  What are, what are some of the examples of this being used in sports?

• 16:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's like loads of anecdotal evidence of like, coaches kind of giving, telling their athletes that they're taking this kind of banned substance, but they're actually just giving them an injection of like glucose or whatever. Like, but because the athletes kind of believe they've taken this performance enhancer, they do, you know, like they have much greater strength or endurance. So, you know, it's being used kind of, I think that's ethically dubious, like misleading the athletes and like getting them to feel that they're taking a banned substance is like, you know, definitely like some questions and alarm bells there. But I think more generally, like, there's a lot of research just showing that you, a lot of the sport supplements that we take, like the legal

• 17:07Speaker 00

  ones are also kind of benefiting from a placebo effect. So things like caffeine that we might take as a muscle stimulant, actually, the research shows that if you give people decaf. But tell them that it's like high intensity caffeine, they like get a lot stronger. And if you give them like proper, like high dose of caffeine and tell them that it's decaf, they actually get weaker because of that.

• 17:30Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's crazy. So actually, most of the benefits from that supplement is coming from our expectations, not from the chemical effects.

• 17:39Chris Williamson?

  Hit the bed. So another implication here for marketers and general branding is the story that you tell people around the things that they're taking largely determine their experiences of it. And I'm in Austin at the moment, and there is a strong psychedelic community here. And I had, do you know Hamilton Morris, Hamilton's pharmacopeia guy who used to work for Vice?

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Ah, yeah, yeah, I do.

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  So long stringy kind of chemist guy that goes and takes drugs all over the world. I was talking to him about Bufo alvarius, which was the toad, psychedelic toad. And people used to sort of rub it on a piece of glass and then they scrape it off and then they smoke the toad venom. And he is adamant that you're able to recreate that chemically one to one, that it is the same molecular structure. And yet people still went about using the toad. And there is a whole story around the fact that it's sacred. And he had the exact same thought of what you're mentioning there with regards to the supplements, that literally none of it is to do with the fact that it's come from a toad. And everything

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  is to do with the fact that there's this story around the fact that the toad is sacred and you go on a big walk to go and find them and you see them and you spend time with them. And the same thing, when people are talking about psychedelics, set and setting, those are the two things that you try and control. What's your intention coming into this? What's the experience been around this? If you're going away to do an ayahuasca retreat, you're fasting for days beforehand, you make sure that you don't swear, you're in this beautiful surrounding, you've got, you know, indigenous music being played and you've got a headdress on and people are dousing you in flower petal water and stuff. What is this? It's priming, it's story, it's narrative, it's creating that expectation that something magical and positive is about to happen.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's totally it. Like, the ritual is just so important there. But it's like, I almost find it surprising that anyone could think you could separate the two. Because I would say, yeah, like, in those experiences, like, maybe eighty percent of what people are feeling is going to be from the ritual, from the story, like you said, from the setting, and like, a very small part is going to come from the drug. I mean, we see this in in medicine with like, people who are receiving morphine after an operation. So they could receive that in their intravenous drip. It's just delivered automatically. Or you can have a doctor give you an injection and tell you, you know, this is pain relief, you're going to feel better. And actually, to get the same level of pain relief,

• 20:13Speaker 00

  you need twice as big a dose when it's the morphine is administered surreptitiously without the ritual of the doctor giving you that morphine. So it's like, the placebo effect alone is like, yeah, like, half of the power of morphine, which is quite crazy.

• 20:28Chris Williamson?

  I remember reading a story in one of Johann Hari's books about a guy who had a magic electric wand thing in the eighteen hundreds or the nineteen hundreds. Do you know this story? He used to wave it over people and then over time they took different things away. Do you know this?

• 20:45Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 20:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so these patients were catatonic for one reason or another. Maybe it was chronic pain or back pain or depression or something. And this guy said, I've created this special new device and I'm going to wave it over you and it's going to make everything better. And it was all complex and maybe it used electricity and it was wood wrapped in metal with wires and other stuff. He used to wave it over people and these people that had been catatonic for years had sometimes got up and started moving around. Ah, it's a miracle. And over time, I can't remember if it was this guy or if it was somebody else that was trying to disprove it or whatever, or stress test it, started recreated their own and started taking bits away from it. So first they unplugged the electricity

• 21:27Chris Williamson?

  and then they removed the wires and then they took away the metal sheet and then they took away the wood and then it was just someone waving their hand over people and saying the same thing. And you end up with exactly the same outcome.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. And so I think a lot of, well, like, part of the placebo effect is just that feeling that someone is kind of caring for you. That can be quite powerful in itself. And we know that that can do things like reduce the inflammation that you feel within your body. So it's almost like if you're kind of feeling isolated and ill, your body's like sending loads of inflammatory markers like that can kind of, they attack pathogens by like brute force. But when you know that you're being cared for, that you have kind of some kind of security, the body can like remove that inflammation and allow like the more specific parts of your immune system to kick into

• 22:19Speaker 00

  action. So like the production of antibodies. So yeah, I feel like the healing ritual in itself is super important. And then on top of that, we have the specific expectations of what the treatment is going to kind of give us, like what benefits we're going to get. And then that can have more specific effects on like, you know, whether you have like pain relief, whether it like reduces your blood pressure, like all of that kind of stuff.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  You said that our beliefs are more powerful than our genes when it comes to exercise. Why is that?

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so there's this experiment, it was just like the, the scientists like asked these people to come into the lab, they gave them a genetic test. It was looking at the Creb, Creb one gene. So that's just, we know that that is involved in like loads of things to do with like endurance exercise. So kind of how efficiently your lungs kind of can exchange the carbon dioxide for oxygen, your like body temperature as you exercise. If you have like the bad variant, you just start to feel like hotter and more uncomfortable, like and a bit more sweaty as you exercise. So, you know, like it is important, but the scientists gave sham feedback to these participants. So they, you know, regardless of what they actually had, they told some like, you have this amazing variant, you're going to be

• 23:35Speaker 00

  brilliant. And the others were told like, you're really not cut out for exercise, like don't expect much. So that changed like the endurance on the treadmill, like it did have an immediate effect on performance, but um but actually then it changed the physiological measures too. So actually, if you expected to um have this like great version of the gene, it actually changed the efficiency of the gas exchange. So you know, that's kind of incredible. Also, things like the efficiency of their movement seem to have been different. Um, but what's even more incredible to me was that actually they then compared the size of the expectation effect to the size of the actual genetic effect. And often, the the expectations were having more of an effect than the genes itself. So whether

• 24:18Speaker 00

  you think you're cut out for exercise is probably more important than the kind of genome you were born with. Wild. What did you you looked at Michael Phelps for some reason? Yeah. What did you learn from him? Um, so he um, he'd always said like, he didn't think like his secret was like in his body, but it was more like in his um amazing ability to visualize exercise. So like, in addition to doing all of the physical training, he would like imagine every race in like minute detail, like all of the turns, like every twist of his body, he would plan out. Um, and then he he said it was like his visualization was so good that when he actually got into the pool, it was almost as if he'd done like an extra kind of training practice. Um, and then so that's like really intriguing, but it's kind

• 25:03Speaker 00

  of anecdotal. But then actually, this scientific research shows that um visualizing exercise can be really powerful on its own. So there's like this study, um, they just got people to kind of imagine like lifting heavy objects every day for six weeks. Um, they weren't actually doing any weightlifting, they were just imagining it. Um, and then like compared to the beginning of that period, they were like 10% stronger. Um, compared to participants who hadn't done any kind of imaginary lifting at all, and they were actually a bit weaker. Um, it sounds incredible and like. I think it's important to emphasise here that like the scientists aren't claiming that it was actually building the muscles themselves, that they didn't have more kind of muscle mass. But what the brain was doing was kind of recalibrating

• 25:47Speaker 00

  what it thought the muscles could achieve. And then that was causing it to recruit more muscle fibres. So when we exercise, actually, even if we're like really exerting ourselves, we only recruit about fifty, like fifty percent of our muscle fibres. That's to kind of stop us from exhausting ourselves and giving us like more energy reserves if we need it later. Probably when they were doing this visualization exercise, it was just persuading the brain to maybe recruit a few more of those muscle fibres, which then made them like physically stronger, even though they didn't have bigger muscles.

• 26:18Chris Williamson?

  A big chunk of what people are doing when they train in the gym is drilling that CNS. Right. Getting them, they're called movement engrams, making sure that you're moving efficiently, that you're doing things right. And I remember hearing about, I ruptured my Achilles a year and a half ago and my doctor had said to me, look, throughout the process of this, before you can get on to doing calf raises, you can restrict the atrophy that you're going to get in your calf if you imagine yourself doing calf raises. So although it was difficult for me to do, because the only thing more boring than doing calf raises is only imagining that you're doing calf raises. But I would, I would do a little working set

• 27:00Chris Williamson?

  on the days that I could be bothered, where I would imagine that I was doing that. I have no idea whether or not it had an impact, but at least it seems like, you know, that atrophy of the CNS would have probably been downregulated.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I think that's like, I mean, like, that's really where this, where this kind of technique is so promising is for rehabilitation, like, you know, like when people break limbs, like they do experience a lot of like strength loss. And then this research has shown that they can kind of cut the amount of strength that they lose by about fifty percent if they imagine doing the exercises. So it's like, you know, it's just helping them to it's like giving them a head start when they do get back to kind of doing their normal workouts.

• 27:40Chris Williamson?

  What did you look at to do with sleep?

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, this was totally fascinating to me. So like scientists can just like get people into this, into their labs and get them to sleep for a night and they can measure like the brain activity to see if they've actually been asleep or if it's been really disturbed. And then you get people to kind of report how much sleep they had. And in general, people's subjective assessment of their sleep is just really poor. So like almost everyone like over or underestimates how much they've slept. So you get this group who are like the complaining good sleepers. So they sleep like eight hours a night, you know, no problem there at all. But they might, I guess, you know, they wake up like in the middle of the night for like a couple of minutes.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  But in their head, it was like they were awake for hours and they are totally convinced that they're going to have the effects of insomnia the next day. And what you can see is that that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. So they suffer from like poor concentration, you know, fatigue, irritability, all of these things, just because of their expectations, not because they've suffered any kind of sleep loss.

• 28:49Chris Williamson?

  And the reverse presumably as well for the people who undersleep but convince themselves that they've probably done okay.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, the non complaining bad sleepers are the total opposite. So they actually don't have any of the effects of insomnia, not even like things like high blood pressure, which often comes from bad sleep loss. They're just completely immune to all of that. So I actually kind of personally identify with that. Like I, I do think like I do have disrupted sleep, but I also just like try to focus on the, on how much sleep I have got. Cause I know that like, you know, even if it feels quite disturbed, like if you're just kind of lying there dozing, that's better than like not getting any sleep at all. And yeah, so I don't get like a bad like effects of insomnia. Whereas like my partner's the total opposite, like he will like, he sleeps for like nine hours a night. But if he wakes up once, he will be like in a really bad mood the next day.

• 29:42Chris Williamson?

  Did you look at people who consider themselves or think that they're not going to get to sleep very easily? And people, everyone's familiar with this. You've got a big event tomorrow, or you're going away on holiday and the flight's early. So you get to bed a little bit earlier than usual and you end up falling asleep three hours after your usual bedtime, lying awake in bed, thinking, I need to get to sleep. I'm going to guess that the expectation effect must... Why, are you expecting to go to sleep? I guess that you're fulfilling the prophecy of fearing that you won't.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly it. It's like you're raising the anxiety that you won't. And then when you're not getting to sleep, you're kind of catastrophizing that and focusing on all of the kind of bad effects that are going to arise from that sleep loss. So yeah, that's like, I mean, it is, you know, I've experienced that a lot and it's like a terrible thing. But actually, counterintuitively, the best way to avoid that is to try to stay awake. If you're just like,

• 30:40Speaker 00

  if you're just like, well, I'm not going to sleep. So I'm just going to like stay awake here. And like you will yourself to stay awake. You kind of cut through all of that anxiety and ironically, then you get to sleep like more quickly. So, yeah.

• 30:53Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. What about aging then? You said at the start that the expectation effect can reduce life by seven years?

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So researchers in the US kind of looked at these huge longitudinal studies, so tracking people's kind of lives from, you know, like their teenage years right to their kind of deaths in their seventies and eighties. And at some point in that, you know, like in their thirties, they kind of measured like their expectations of what was going to happen as they got older. So they asked them, you know, is it going to be a time of decline and disability? You're going to kind of lose your independence? Or do you see it as this kind of time of growth, you know, time of wisdom? Like, you know, they weren't kind of asking them like, do you deny that there's any problems that come with aging? But just some people kind of see the good as well

• 31:41Speaker 00

  as the bad. And they found that those, those kind of views that people had in midlife then predicted how long they would live by a difference of about seven and a half years. So like, big difference in longevity. And then later-

• 31:57Chris Williamson?

  Do you know how big the study was?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would have been thousands of participants.

• 32:02Chris Williamson?

  So this is a really representative sample?

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then it's been like repeated again and again with loads of different samples. And they found the expectations of aging can predict things like, um, like your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. Like if you have the positive use, it cuts your risk of Alzheimer's by about 50%. Even if you have the genetic predisposition to get Alzheimer's, it still cuts it by 50%.

• 32:29Chris Williamson?

  Mate, this is wild. This is so crazy.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  So I was like totally skeptical of that. Um, but then, you know, like we were saying, like the studies were well conducted and they were like big numbers. Um, and then they, the scientists have also kind of joined the dots to kind of find the mechanism for how that would happen. Um, and so like, one is just kind of behavioral. Um, it's like if you're defeatist about getting old, you're not going to do so much exercise, you're not going to look after your health, you know, that's going to have an effect. Um, but there's also a kind of physiological effect here too. And that's like, if you feel vulnerable as you get old, um, every challenge in your life is going to feel like super stressful. So that's going to raise like levels of cortisol, um, it raises levels of like inflammation.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  We know that both of those things can cause bodily wear and tear. And then you can see the effects right down to kind of differences within the cells themselves. So it kind of, um, the people with the negative effects have like shorter telomeres. Like, like you, um, I know you know this, but yeah, like those protective caps that kind of protect our DNA from kind of damage. Um, and the kind of epigenetic markers within their cells, um, it's like the cells are just ticking at like a quicker rate. If you have the negative beliefs compared to the positive beliefs.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that this effect exists? So there's some mechanistic elements of this, right? Like you said, the person, and this is not just for aging, but the, the, the whole effect overall. I'm trying to work out why this is adaptive. I'm trying to work out why it's so universal, why it seems to work across a million different mechanisms. Why have we got this?

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, I think it's like just so fundamental to how the brain works. And what it does is it gives us kind of flexibility. So there's like this new idea in kind of the study of consciousness that the brain works as this kind of prediction machine. So it's always like building simulations of what's going on around us.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  That helps us to kind of process the sensory data. But also, just as importantly, it's kind of, it's allowing the brain to kind of prepare the body for the challenges that we're going to face. So, you know, just like adjusting the levels of your hormones like so that if you're going to face like a kind of danger, like you're kind of pumped up and like physically ready to attend to the threat. And, you know, your psychology is going to change as well. So that you are kind of more on the ball and like more capable of kind of, of like focusing on the danger and not kind of thinking about other stuff, like not being too dozy. So it's actually, this prediction machine is giving us a lot of flexibility. It's allowing us to respond like second by second to what's going on around us.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  The thing is, like those predictions, like sometimes it's purely based on things like the context of the situation that you're in. Or, you know, like how much you've eaten, how much you've slept, you know, like there's definitely like an objective element to that, that the body's kind of getting from all of its kind of senses, like within the body and like on the skin. But also it's just drawing on all of its previous experiences to kind of calibrate those predictions. And that's where like our conscious thinking and like our expectations and our interpretations of the events, like the, yeah, like the way we kind of choose to frame them. That's shaping the predictions and then it's shaping how the body responds as well.

• 35:59Chris Williamson?

  What do you see as the difference between creating a positive expectation and being delusional?

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's something like I really wanted to get clear in my book because it's like so much of the positive thinking literature is kind of about being delusional in a way. So it's like, you know, we were talking about like your expectations at the gym, like if someone is like a real couch potato, like going to the gym and telling themselves that they're like an Olympic athlete, it's only going to lead to disappointment. Like you cannot be that delusional that you're really going to fool yourself. So I think like it's really important to set like realistic expectations, even if you're improving your expectations. It's like always trying to be kind of honest yourself and authentic. So like at the gym, like I think like, don't tell yourself you're going to be, you know, like a world-class athlete straight away.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  But like, just reinterpret those feelings that you're having at the gym. Like if you're being like overly negative about like the fatigue that you're feeling and you're kind of catastrophizing that and you're telling yourself that there's something like fundamentally wrong with your body. Like you just need to reappraise those feelings and actually look at it much more objectively and and kind of just tell yourself that actually if you're feeling fatigue like that is not only normal, but it's desirable. It's like you with fasting. It's like you're telling yourself that, yeah, like I'm hungry, but that is why I'm doing this.

• 37:22Chris Williamson?

  That's what I'm here for. Yes, exactly.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  So I think that's how we want to reframe our feelings is just to be and our expectations is just to kind of yeah, to be honest and to just like avoid catastrophizing stuff when actually we can just see it in a more positive light.

• 37:39Chris Williamson?

  So the you've got the proximal zone of development for skill acquisition and we've got the proximal zone of expectation for the expectation effect, not too far, not too little, certainly not negative.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I love that. Yeah, it definitely has to be a kind of proximal zone. And actually, like if we look at the expectation effect around like stress and anxiety, like it's exactly what you're describing there. And that like Our culture has always been like really down on anxiety and seeing it as being like purely kind of detrimental to your performance and debilitating. But actually, the science shows us that, you know, those stress responses can be really useful and adaptive. Like, you know, cortisol is kind of sharpening your mind. It's actually helping you to release kind of glucose into your blood. When your heart is pumping like that can like really hard, that can feel quite uncomfortable. But it's actually like getting all the oxygen around your body into your brain. So it's like preparing you for like a big challenge.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  And what the scientists like, they kind of told some people like suppress your feelings. Like just, you know, tell yourself, I'm calm, not anxious. And they told the other people just like, um, just accept your anxiety, but recognize that it might be having these benefits and that you actually evolved to feel this for a reason. And then they got them to do things like difficult public speaking or like, um, doing like a tough kind of graduate exam. And they found that actually the kind of honesty appraisal of the feelings, like not suppressing them, but just like reinterpreting what they meant and like just questioning like, are they actually detrimental or could they be useful? That that in itself was enough to improve their performance. You know, on the public speaking, on the exam, kind of making them more creative,

• 39:22Speaker 00

  like improving their numerical skills and reducing their anxiety. And it also just helped them to kind of recover from their anxiety afterwards. So, you know, like if you've had like a stressful event, like sometimes you can just feel exhausted for like the whole day afterwards, like you're, you're still kind of charged. But for these people, they weren't, they just went back to like the normal life, you know, like their body started like digesting their food properly again, you know, their heart rate returned to normal. And that's really important for like the long-term effects of stress. Cause if you can, if you have like a momentary like feeling of stress, but then like recover quickly afterwards, that's not so damaging for your body in the long term.

• 39:58Chris Williamson?

  It's the chronic stress that we're seeing that's super, super damaging to people. I have a friend, comedian Bridget Fettissey, and she still gets very, very nervous before she goes on stage. And she's got a little mantra that she says to herself. She says, I'm not nervous, I'm excited. I'm not nervous, I'm excited. I'm not nervous, I'm excited. And I have another friend, a very well-known DJ, who frequently throws up before he goes to do a set because that's how much he cares, because the nerves are in there. And he's now told me that if he doesn't throw up before a set, he gets concerned. He's more concerned if he doesn't vomit before he goes on than he does because he's not sure if he's in the zone.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that is extreme, but I totally can identify with that. And it's like, like you're saying about kind of, I'm not nervous, I'm excited. Like, because what's happening in your body is like so similar, like they're actually indistinguishable, like excitement and anxiety.

• 40:56Chris Williamson?

  Very much the story that you're telling yourself that is determining whether it is nerves or excitement.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And I think for most people, it's a kind of combination, like you're kind of anxious, but you're also excited. Both, you're feeling both of those things because it's important to you. And it's almost just kind of recognizing that fact that like you're doing this for a purpose. Like, most often people aren't forcing you to do this. You're doing it because you're ambitious or because you love to entertain or whatever. And just recognizing that fact that you're kind of feeling these things for a reason, that can be really powerful.

• 41:26Chris Williamson?

  What was that study to do with people pretending to be fighter pilots?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Ah, yeah, so this was to improve like vision, which is kind of crazy. Yeah, so they took like people with kind of normal vision and some people who are a bit kind of short sighted. And they just kind of told them to pretend that you're a proper fighter pilot. So. They gave them a sight test first of all and then put them in this, you know, hyper realistic kind of flight simulation. And while they were doing that simulation, they had to kind of read off some codes from the wings of the planes that they were kind of flying around. And what they found was that the people who were doing that kind of hyper realistic simulation, that they actually like their eyesight physically improved. So they were able to see characters that were much smaller than they had been able

• 42:16Speaker 00

  to see on the kind of real sight test. And then they repeated this experiment in other settings that they, one of them was just like they took the normal sight test, but you know, it goes from like big letters to small, they just reversed it. And the idea there was that we have this kind of association that the further down the test you go, the harder it is to see, but the top you should be able to see. And again, they were able to distinguish characters that they hadn't been able to see before.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  You looked at willpower as well, and I'd heard this, I'd seen a story to do with, was it Roy Baumeister that did the original willpower degradation studies?

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So I remember seeing, how would you say, a prelude to the expectation effect a few years ago, when I was reading about the fact that, what's it, it's not willpower degradation, what's it called?

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Um, ego depletion.

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  Ego depletion, that's it. Ego depletion seems to be present only in the people that know about ego depletion.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:20Chris Williamson?

  So tell, what's the red pill that people need to understand about willpower?

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that is totally an upper expectation effect. So yeah, what's interesting is that in Western culture as a whole, we've kind of had this assumption that like, when you practice kind of mental focus or kind of self-control, like when you're resisting temptation, that that is tiring and that it's gonna... The more you do it, like, the harder it's gonna be, essentially. So, you know, and that's exactly what people like Roy Baumeister heard recorded. You know, like, it's, it is like a muscle that you're kind of tiring out. And the longer you do it, like, the more likely you are to kind of lose your focus or give into temptation. But then they did some studies in India where people don't share that cultural belief.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  So actually, in India, it's much more common for people to think that, like, willpower is self-perpetuating. It's almost like they think, like, once you get into the zone, it's like easier to kind of continue practicing your willpower. Yeah, it's like a

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  Which is equally plausible.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. It's just like anything. Like, um, once you get into the kind of momentum going, it kind of can continue. And so then they did the ego depletion experiments with those people and they found the total opposite. Actually, like, they didn't experience ego depletion at all. Their willpower did indeed increase, increase the more they practiced it. So their focus was much better on a second task compared to the first task, because I'd had this time to kind of warm up. So that was really strong evidence that, like, yeah, it's totally due to our underlying beliefs about what's gonna happen to the brain. It's purely an expectation effect. There's no kind of biological cause for ego depletion.

• 45:04Chris Williamson?

  Does knowing about the expectation effect or the placebo effect change the effect of it? Because I don't know if we have created an information hazard for everybody who's listening now that could have blissfully stumbled upon the expectation effect and benefited from it. But now they know the fact that it's only a blah blah.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  No, yeah. I mean, the great thing is, it's actually the opposite. Like, um, knowing about the expectation effect can actually make it more powerful in some way. And so we know this from studies of placebos. So like in a typical placebo experiment, you give someone a painkiller, you give someone a dummy pill, but you told them it's a painkiller. So it's like, you have to be deceptive.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  But then scientists started like wondering, well, what happens if we actually just give people a jar of placebo pills labelled as like placebo pills take two a day? Can that actually improve their pain just as well as the uh kind of surreptitious placebos? Um and they found that actually it can. So in this study from Portugal, they were looking at people with chronic pain. They gave them um these pills and they also gave them this kind of explanation of the expectation effect. So just a kind of grounding in like what happens with the mind body connection, how the brain can produce its own painkillers, you know, all of that information. And then they just gave people these pills and told them to kind of take them twice a day. And they were really clear, like, you must take the pills even though they're dummy pills.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Um then five days later, they had seen a reduction in their symptoms already. There was about thirty percent um on the kind of standard score of pain. So that's the clinical threshold for any new treatment. Like if a treatment's effective, you have to have a thirty percent reduction. And these people were experiencing that from open labelled placebos.

• 46:49Chris Williamson?

  Bottle it, sell it.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. We need more and actually you can buy like placebo pills on Amazon. So uh like it's already available if you want it. Um but actually like, you know, that's fine. Like and if I had chronic pain, I probably would take like open labelled placebos. But actually, there's just loads of other ways you can like um increase expectations without kind of the sham treatments in medicine. So, you know, just like giving people psychological therapy where you kind of explain the importance of expectations. And then so if they've had heart surgery, you kind of just help them to kind of set out a kind of framework for like how they hope they will improve over the next six months. That can also bring about this kind of placebo like response.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  So you still see kind of improvements in like biological measures, like the level of inflammation that they're experiencing after the operation, how quickly they leave hospital, you know, how quickly they return to work. All of that just through honestly helping people to change their expectations.

• 47:48Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't there something to do with medicines where people began to use genuine medicines? And then they were either weaned off or the dose got reduced or something? Because I imagine that must be, let's say that you have a drug that's got a relatively toxic side effect, perhaps, or there's a reason why you wouldn't want to be on it longer term. You introduce it, you taper it down, that would be, you get both sides, right? You've been introduced to the experience, you've got that set in the setting almost, and then you dial it back and people still get to benefit.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's a really big hope for treating opioid addiction, essentially. So there've been studies looking at people in rehab from terrible injuries. And you do start out by giving them an opioid drug, but very quickly, you give them the drug and then you give them the placebo pill as well. So they take both together. And you can strengthen it even further by associating both with a really strong smell, so like the smell of cardamom, for example. So you'd have like, you'd sniff the cardamom and you take the placebo and you take the drug. And then after a few days, you just stop or encourage them, you don't force them, but you encourage them, like, you don't need to take the drug anymore, just take the placebo pill and the smell.

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  Sniff the cardamom, yeah. So this is like a Pavlovian weaning?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's exactly that. And then what happens is the brain is already responding, it's been conditioned then to produce its own opioids at a much higher level than it would without the conditioning response. And so that can really reduce the amount of the active drugs that people take. And there have been case studies where people have completely weaned themselves off the opioids quite quickly, just by using this technique.

• 49:36Chris Williamson?

  What was the thing to do with peanut allergies?

• 49:40Speaker 00

  Ah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that was, that's one of my favorite studies because I think, again, it shows just how we're like, we're talking about honestly reframing stuff rather than like, being delusional. Um, so like, when kids have peanut allergies, you can actually train the immune system to stop responding to the peanut protein. And it's just like exposure therapy. So you start off with like a tiny dose of the protein and then you build up over six months to hold peanuts. So by the end, you know, if a kid is at a party and they accidentally eat like a Snickers bar or whatever, they're not going to be in danger having eaten that because they've trained their body to deal with it. Um, but when, when the kids do this therapy, it's like really uncomfortable, you know, because the body is starting to have like a mild allergic reaction as they increase

• 50:25Speaker 00

  the doses. So they get hives, you know, uncomfortable feelings in their mouth. They might feel sick and all of these things that are frightening and kind of seem to be putting them in danger. And the researchers like just tried to get them to reinterpret how they saw those, that discomfort. So they just said, this is, rather than being dangerous, this is actually a sign that the treatment is being effective. It's like, in the same way, when you're doing strength training, your muscles are gonna start aching. Like, you know, you're, this is a sign that you're stimulating the immune system and it's kind of learning and responding. Um, so at the end of the trial, those patients had had that kind of training and reframing. They just reported fewer side

• 51:08Speaker 00

  effects, um, overall. So it had reduced their discomfort. But like even more impressively, like it had also changed the efficacy of the treatment. So those kids were actually showing higher levels of this like friendly antibody that can protect them from the like overall, like noxious allergic reaction. It kind of just stops the immune system from overreacting. And they had much higher levels than the kids who, who hadn't learned to reframe the symptoms in that way.

• 51:38Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered whether or not this in part accounts for some of the side effects we've seen with the recent vaccine rollout? And the fact that people have, I mean, has there ever been as widespread of a medication with as many disputed, disputable side effects and then people reporting them and all sorts of stuff?

• 52:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, totally. It definitely has had an effect like, um, and you know, like, I think on social media, you could see everyone kind of sharing their kind of war stories about having the vaccine and then like being knocked out for a couple of days or, you know, having a bad headache or whatever. So it was very much like contagious, these expectations. Um. So the studies so far showed that actually, you know, these vaccines are quite, they definitely stimulate the immune system. So they do cause like for some people, about 25% of people, they do lead to those kinds of um, uh, mild side effects. So things like fatigue, maybe having a bit of a fever, having a headache, you know, that's all

• 52:39Speaker 00

  kind of to be expected for like half of 25% of the people having the vaccines. But actually, in the um, in the trials, you saw that the people receiving the placebo injections were also um, quite likely to have those side effects too. So about half as many people had those side effects in the placebo trials. So we know from that that, yeah, like the vaccines themselves were causing some of these like um, slightly uncomfortable side effects, but the expectations were causing it for a large number of people too.

• 53:12Chris Williamson?

  And there was that thing at Gatwick Airport, which I remember from a few years ago where it was all over the press and the entire airport was shut down and people were saying that there was drones absolutely everywhere, but you reckon that might be an expectation effect as well?

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that was, so yeah, like in 2018, you know, I think just one person reported a drone and then like within a couple of days, like hundreds of people said they've seen them. Um, but like the police and the army were using like, you know, radar, like they were, you know, using all their technology to kind of detect where these drones were. And like, they couldn't find a single one. And no one took a photo of a drone that could be verified.

• 53:51Chris Williamson?

  That's it. There was no footage. It didn't appear on any radar. It wasn't on any of the equipment. And yet you had this cascade of reports coming in.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it just seems like it was, yeah, like a contagious expectation effect. And so we know that the expectations can shape perceptions and that it's like, it was priming people to see a drone when like there was nothing in the sky.

• 54:14Chris Williamson?

  This would be interesting to look at if there was a similar sort of event happening again. What you would presumably expect in terms of the number of reports would be like a normal distribution curve. So you would have one, a few, a few more, a few more, a few more, a peak, and then it would begin to tail off. I wonder if you mapped those onto a distribution about whether or not it would come back like that. That would be interesting.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think anecdotally, from what the police had reported, it did seem like that with Gatwick, in that you did start out with just one, and then within a couple of hours, there was maybe another person seen it. But then as it kind of got into the media, you know, and was spread around the airport, like, yeah, you saw rapid increase. And like, there can't have been that many drones around. Like, it would have just been impossible. So, I mean, you can never rule out the possibility that maybe the first report was genuine, but definitely like the airport didn't need to be closed for like three days and like disrupt all of those holidays. Like, yeah.

• 55:13Chris Williamson?

  One thing that you said earlier is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is this sort of culture of generalized cynicism that we've got at the moment. And when you realize, you are right, there's something, people think of it as more rational, more cool, almost, to be cynical and, and sort of blunt about most things. You see this, like, in its extreme on the internet. No one is excitable on the internet. Everyone's playing like a Louis Theroux persona. And, yeah, when you think about the fact that that cynicism and the sort of public messaging that we have, and then the social, like,

• 55:58Chris Williamson?

  top-down public messaging, and then the bottom-up social messaging that people see, literally could be making people more sick, more fat, less healthy, stupider, with side effects from, you know, it's everything. Cynicism, cynicism genuinely is kind of like a disease or a virus.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it totally is. And like, what really annoys me is it's like, um, if you're being like, like, people think it's like, super smart to be skeptical, but actually being reflexively skeptical and just not believing anything good. Like, to me, that is like, just as bad as

• 56:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's just as stupid.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. As being totally gullible. It's like, you're doing exactly the same thing. It's just you're taking the opposite viewpoint. Um, so yeah, that drives me crazy. And especially, like, I see it a lot with, like, um, you know, like, as a science writer, like amongst my colleagues, actually, it's kind of quite fashionable to always be like, super skeptical of any new and exciting result. It's like, that's not, that's not being like, a better journalist or like, a more skeptical thinker. That's actually just like, kind of virtue signaling almost, or yeah, like trying to prove your intelligence without applying your intelligence.

• 57:09Chris Williamson?

  The programming is just as simplistic. It's just moving in the opposite direction. You haven't thought about it either. You haven't considered it either. You're just taking a heterodox position in the hopes that this makes you seem cool. And so what about the ethics then? Do you think that there's an ethical concern around deceiving somebody or deceiving other people, even if it's in the service of making their outcomes in life better?

• 57:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I do see it as like a big ethical issue to like, um, deceive people. Um, and I think like in medicine, you know, like, um, it's why these open label placebos, like the honest placebos are so important because I think if you start deceiving patients, and then they find out they've been deceived, um, then they're going to lose like a lot of faith in the medical profession. And then that's going to cause like problems further down the line. So I think we have to, like, you just have to be honest for like the ethical reasons. But then I actually think like, when we know that you can apply the expectation effect honestly, without any kind of problems anyway, like, there's no need to be deceptive, really. Like, you, it is enough often, just like in so many of these studies, it's enough just to kind of

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Like tell people about the science, like you just give them like a kind of, you know, popular science article that kind of explains how like stress can be beneficial to you, or you know, how you can reframe the feelings of exercise and that that can improve your performance. Like, you know, very kind of plain, like not deceptive at all. Just that information is enough, like the knowledge is power in these cases. So, yeah, I don't think we need to worry about deception anymore.

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  Are there any effects that run counter to the expectation effect? Are there any things that you found? I think you mentioned something to do with constantly following happiness as a, actually can make people less happy, which seems to kind of run in the opposite direction. Were there any others?

• 59:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's the main one, I think. And yeah, it's kind of like, it makes sense. I mean, so it's like counterintuitive, but it's like if you're

• 59:12Speaker 00

  always trying to be happy, like the kind of converse of that is that you're actually then like demonizing the negative feelings you might be having, or the uncomfortable feelings you might be having. So it kind of is like an expectation effect in that it's like, if you want to be so happy that you think that anytime you feel frustration or anxiety, it's a disaster. You're kind of then setting yourself up to like experience those emotions a lot more negatively and to kind of for them to have a bigger impact on your life. But yeah, it is, I think like the simplistic view of the expectation effect would just be it's like, tell yourself to be happy and you will be happy. But yeah, that doesn't happen. So, yeah, I think we have to be careful to kind of have the,

• 59:53Speaker 00

  to kind of outline the limits of the expectation effect and the nuances. It's not always as simple as just kind of hoping for the best, you know. I also just think we have to be honest about the fact that like, say in medicine, like, say you've got like a terminal illness or, you know, like just improving your expectations isn't going to help you to get better. Like sometimes the expectation effect just, there's no physiological mechanism by which it could help you to, to kind of benefit from the expectation effect essentially. So we, we just have to be careful to be honest about kind of when it does work and when like you're not going to expect to see like the full benefit.

• 1:00:35Chris Williamson?

  Is one of the most important things here,

• 1:00:39Chris Williamson?

  information or people's understanding or knowledge around whatever the experiences that they're going through. So for instance, talking about going to the gym, the understanding that one of the byproducts of going to the gym is going to be you sweating and you lifting, you feeling aches in your muscles and stuff like that. That knowledge enables the reframing, right? My point is, is there a, it seems like one of the first steps to becoming effective at the expectation effect is a degree of understanding or knowledge around the specifics of whatever it is that you're trying to get the effect to work on. Is that right?

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it totally is. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, yeah, with like exercise, it helps for you to understand like the exercise physiology and to understand why you're feeling these things. Because otherwise it's really easy for you to be like, to catastrophize those feelings if you don't understand the science of kind of why they might be beneficial to you. The same with stress, like you feel the discomfort. And if you don't understand like some of the basics of the science of like, why we have the cortisol spike at all. Then yeah, all you're going to focus on is the negative feelings and not necessarily on why it might be useful. So yeah, I really do think actually it's like just a bit of scientific literacy in all of these areas can go a long way to helping you to reframe your expectations.

• 1:02:03Chris Williamson?

  That's one part of it, right? What I want to try and get out of you is what are the

• 1:02:11Chris Williamson?

  common strategies if people want to effectively apply the expectation effect, which aren't contingent on specific knowledge about the thing that they're trying to to use it on. You know, reframing and all of that stuff. What are your, what's the best framework that you've come up with that people can take away?

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's definitely some things that I think you can do, but like whatever challenge you're facing, it's they're going to help you to form better or more objective expectations. And my favorite one is really this process called like self distancing. And so it was developed by Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan, kind of independently from the expectation effect. But what he had noticed is that if you The way you talk to yourself is often really different from the way you would talk to a friend. So you're much more self critical and much more negative when you talk to yourself compared to if you're advising someone who's in exactly the same position.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  And so his solution to that is just to imagine that you're advising your friend like when you're talking to yourself. And you can even use like the third person kind of language. So you can be like, I could be like, uh, you know, it sounds stupid. It sounds like Elmo from Sesame Street or whatever. But it could be like, um, you know, like David's worried about, I don't know, like, um, getting older. David feels that he's gonna be like vulnerable and, you know, suffer from decline, you know, all of that. But the fact is like, if you were talking to yourself, you might be like, look in the mirror, see some wrinkles and be like, oh God, I look hideous. This is awful. Like it's only gonna get worse. If you were talking to your friend, like you would be like, no, you're still fine.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  Like, um, there's still lots to look forward to, like, you know, don't be so defeated. Like you can still grow, you can still like, there's still stuff that you can do and achieve like as you're getting older. And so, yeah, I think that's just something that I found super helpful. Like whenever I am kind of wrestling with like needlessly negative expectations is just to kind of shift perspective and think like, would I actually talk to other people and, and like tell them the things that I'm telling myself?

• 1:04:20Chris Williamson?

  And that's use the third person with an inner monologue and also imagine that you were saying it to somebody else?

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And treat yourself with the kind of compassion that you would treat someone else, basically. So.

• 1:04:34Chris Williamson?

  David, this is great. Now, this is a really, really cool effect. I'm very, very glad that you've written the book. If people want to see what you do, where should they go online?

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  So my website is davidrobson.me. I'm D underscore A underscore Robson on Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah. But I mean, basically Twitter or my website are the best place.

• 1:04:57Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I really appreciate you coming on today. Thank you.

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  Cool. Yeah, it's been my pleasure. Thanks.

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