Obstacle Illusions: With Guests Daniella McCahey & Tom Gilovich

We're wired to interpret our challenges as bigger than our advantages, even if the reality is more balanced.

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

• 0:05Katy Milkman?

  We've asked some volunteers to participate in a very unscientific experiment. We've given them a series of exercises.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Thanks for the heating up.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  Flexibility sound great.

• 0:21Katy Milkman?

  Half of the exercises are uncomfortable or strenuous or awkward. The other half are pretty easy.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  All right, how many squats?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  I'm in a plank and I'm lifting my knees one at a time to my elbows.

• 0:38Katy Milkman?

  But we didn't tell people that the exercises were designed to be half easy and half hard.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Sound great.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  I hope this isn't an indicator of my overall fitness level.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Those are so hard. Okay.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Those are less bad.

• 0:58Katy Milkman?

  After volunteers wrapped up these activities, we asked them to each reflect on what percentage of the exercises were difficult or annoying and what percentage were easy or straightforward. The answer should be 50% easy, 50% hard. But listen to the responses we got.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  75%. It felt it was a lot harder. 25% felt easier.

• 1:21Speaker 04

  Maybe like a quarter of them, so like 25 to 30%, I'd say, were like easy.

• 1:27Speaker 05

  I felt like I was doing the hard ones, 70%, and the easier exercise, about 30%.

• 1:33Katy Milkman?

  Again, we weren't asking them to rate the difficulty, but to reflect on how many of the exercises were difficult and how many were easy. The fact that all of our volunteers estimated that more than half of the exercises were hard points to an interesting tendency to focus more attention on our negative or challenging experiences than our positive or easy experiences. On this episode, we'll look at how this tendency can affect athletes,

• 2:03Katy Milkman?

  siblings.

• 2:04Speaker 04

  For sure, my parents were way harder on me as the first child.

• 2:09Katy Milkman?

  And even the mythology around famous explorers.

• 2:22Katy Milkman?

  I'm Dr. Katie Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  Okay. Hi, my name is Daniella McCahey, and I'm an assistant professor at Texas Tech.

• 3:03Katy Milkman?

  Daniella studies the history of science, and more specifically, she's an expert on the exploration of Antarctica. She's here to talk about one of Antarctica's most famous adventurers.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Richard Byrd was a polar explorer and aviation pioneer. He was the first, possibly, to fly over the North Pole. He also was affiliated with and nominally led five expeditions to Antarctica. He also was not the first, but flew over the Atlantic Ocean. And he had a kind of a life that was strongly associated with adventurism in the first half of the 20th century.

• 3:44Katy Milkman?

  We're going to focus on Byrd's second Antarctic expedition, but his first Arctic expedition was the one that made him a household name.

• 3:53Katy Milkman?

  A little context on how he got his start. Richard Byrd was first trained in aviation in 1917 by the Navy at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. And he was an aviation commander during the last five months of World War I. He caught the exploration bug on an expedition flying into Greenland in 1925. Then, in 1926, he made a daring attempt to fly over the North Pole. It had never been done before.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  He and a bunch of volunteers sailed from New York to Spitsbergen, which is in the Arctic. And this was in May. It's the time that has the least amount of fog. They were flying in a three-engine monoplane, so like a pretty small airplane. So when they go up into the sky, it was actually like sunny out. It was relatively... But about an hour from the North Pole, one of their engines started leaking oil.

• 4:48Katy Milkman?

  It was extremely difficult and risky to attempt an emergency landing near the North Pole. They might crash or be stranded in that unforgiving environment. Pilot Floyd Bennett convinced Byrd that it was a safer bet to continue flying despite the oil leak.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  They just kept going. And the flight there and back was about 1,300 miles, and it took about 15 and a half hours.

• 5:16Katy Milkman?

  Now that they were back on solid ground in Spitsbergen, Byrd and his crew quickly claimed to the world that they were the first to fly over the North Pole. But almost immediately, critics questioned whether or not the expedition had actually succeeded. It's not like anyone was there at the North Pole to witness the flight.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  However, all of his critics said that he sparked this huge interest in polar exploration and in polar aviation for a generation. And he was greeted back in New York with a huge welcome. There was a parade. He got all these medals. He got the Medal of Honor. And so it was significant because it turned him into a celebrity. It turned him into a household name.

• 6:00Katy Milkman?

  That experience and that newfound celebrity status made Richard Byrd hungry for more adventure. In 1928, he embarked on his first Antarctic expedition, during which he and his team established a base that they dubbed Little America. It was located on the Ross Ice Shelf, and it was the first base of its kind in Antarctica. It would serve as a launching point for later expeditions.

• 6:26Katy Milkman?

  In 1933, he led the second Byrd Antarctic expedition.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  The main object was to map and claim land areas around the South Pole to determine what kind of natural resources could be utilized and harvested from Antarctica, and also to study the weather and geological conditions. So this was a substantial expedition. There were some 70 members and two ships.

• 6:52Katy Milkman?

  There were also four airplanes, including a big Curtis Wright biplane and four tractors. And finally, there were 153 sled dogs.

• 7:04Katy Milkman?

  Remember, they were entering the unknown.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  This is still territory that's mostly not studied, not mapped. There's no infrastructure, there's nobody else there. It's just them. So if they were to run into any problems, they only can rely on themselves.

• 7:21Katy Milkman?

  Byrd planned to establish a meteorological station. He set out for the foot of the Transantarctic Mountains, about 400 miles south of Little America. Three men, including Byrd, would live there for the harsh winter. Until this point, no one had ever spent the entire winter in the interior of Antarctica. But on the way...

• 7:42Speaker 04

  There was really bad weather. They couldn't go any further south than just 123 miles. And then, when they got there, they really only had enough supplies for one man. So Byrd decided to stay there completely alone for seven months in order to obtain this continuous meteorological record of this area that hadn't been studied before.

• 8:04Katy Milkman?

  In the winter in Antarctica, the sun never comes up.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  It was completely dark, wintertime, there were frequent blizzards.

• 8:13Katy Milkman?

  Temperatures plunge below negative 70 degrees. That's really cold. So cold that exposed skin can freeze in seconds. It hurts to breathe, and inhaling can damage your lungs if they aren't properly protected. And survival is nearly impossible without extremely specialized gear.

• 8:36Katy Milkman?

  The first two and a half months went reasonably well, and Byrd was able to communicate via wireless in Morse code with the base at Little America.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  One of the real tricks in Antarctica, and being by yourself in general, is to not go crazy. And so he would listen to music and read and keep... The scientific observations going was the only way to keep sane.

• 9:00Katy Milkman?

  Despite the boredom and isolation, Byrd had to remain vigilant.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Making sure he could get in and out of the building because of the buildup of snow around the hut, just doing those types of chores took up a good part of the day. Those types of chores were really welcomed, I think, because of the fact that he was alone, famously. Because of the darkness and the blizzards, he really couldn't stray too far from the hut because that would have been death.

• 9:28Katy Milkman?

  And there were other dangers, too. Because it was so cold, a generator that he used for power, along with a stove vent, both clogged with ice and caused fumes to leak into the hut. This gave Byrd shooting pains and nausea, common effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. Because of those leaking fumes, Byrd could only operate the generator and stove intermittently.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  He wasn't really able to use the stove or cook proper food that whole time. It was really difficult, of course, because he was completely depending on just what he had erected as a shelter for most of his heat. He was eating his food cold and couldn't properly cook it and was in very poor health. But he was still taking the meteorological observations that he was there to do.

• 10:15Katy Milkman?

  His communication became sparse, and the men at the base at Little America feared he was in trouble.

• 10:24Katy Milkman?

  But Byrd didn't want them to risk a rescue mission.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  The idea of continuing to do the science even in the face of danger was part of this narrative of being a serious polar explorer, not just like an adventurer, that he was continuing to collect scientific data even as he was possibly dying.

• 10:44Katy Milkman?

  Despite the dangers, his men decided they would go out into the darkness to find him. At the same time, Byrd was writing notes for his men to find, fully expecting that he would die before they got there.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  They send a rescue attempt in June, and they're unable to. And they send one in early August, and they're unable to. And then the third one is on August 9, and it took 66 hours. And so it was a heroic thing when they finally made it.

• 11:18Katy Milkman?

  Richard Byrd chronicled his experience in the book Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  He has at least three or four other books, but Alone is the one that really becomes a classic, where he's really casting himself as this lone, heroic guy by himself, battling the elements, completely cut off from civilization.

• 11:42Katy Milkman?

  To be fair to Richard Byrd, he really was facing extreme dangers: frostbite, hunger, carbon monoxide poisoning, loneliness, and he truly was cut off from civilization and help. And he did this, at least in part, in service to science.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  I don't think Byrd's primary motivation was about science, but he recognized how this was something that would serve to justify the expenses that he was undertaking in Antarctica.

• 12:13Katy Milkman?

  This was an age of exploration. Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Roald Amundsen, there were many contemporaries of Richard Byrd who were also trying to carve a place for themselves in the history books by achieving feats that had previously seemed impossible. And those achievements really were remarkable. But what often gets lost in the biographies of these heroic adventurers are all the things that worked to their advantage. To even be able to attempt these expeditions, to plan them, fund them, staff them and equip them, required money, influence and state-of-the-art technology, not to mention wealth and social and political status. For example...

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Byrd was born of one of the first families of Virginia, so that's sort of a big deal if you live in Virginia. It's one of the very first founding members of the Virginia colony. His father had been a politician in Virginia. A close family friend growing up was Claude Swenson, who later went on to be the Secretary of Navy under FDR. His older brother was the governor and United States Senator and actually the head of a huge political machine called the Byrd Organization. His wife was also from a very wealthy family, and so, you know, he married an heiress and then also had connections to her family in that way. He was good friends with Henry Ford's son, Edsel Ford,

• 13:39Speaker 04

  and actually named some mountains after him. He was good friends with John Rockefeller Jr. as well. And so both of these men helped him with his fundraising. Being so well-connected to both Virginia politics and then Virginia politicians, who then served in national politics, helped him get a lot of the support that he needed in terms of infrastructure and government support. And then it also kind of taught him, I guess, about publicity.

• 14:10Katy Milkman?

  Byrd quickly grasped how media attention could help his cause. And mass media was growing in size and speed with big advances in communication technology. He also had the advantage of an early naval promotion. He was elevated to admiral after his first Antarctic expedition.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  He was only, I think, 41, and he was an admiral in the Navy, which is much, much younger than anyone else who would have graduated from the Naval Academy at that time. Like, his Naval Academy classmates were not promoted to admiral until like 15 years later, till like World War II. He's able to draw on the Navy to give him legitimacy. Like, he's referred to as Admiral Byrd in like a lot of things, even though he never really served in any sort of combat position. And so Admiral Byrd, looking for funding for his Antarctic expeditions, carries a lot more weight with the public than if he didn't have that affiliation. It makes him more legitimate. He was able to forge relationships with people like the President of the United States, the Secretary of Navy.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  And in the early days, he had access to equipment, instrumentation, expertise, and even personnel. So it was a significant advantage.

• 15:25Katy Milkman?

  The technological advancements of the era also favored Byrd's success in the Antarctic. While Byrd's generator was faulty, the fact that he had access to power and radio transmission gave him a leg up that most previous explorers in the region would have been very jealous of. Wireless radio was barely 20 years old. Byrd's second expedition in 1933 was the first to use voice communications in the Antarctic. And in fact, the team from their base at Little America made weekly broadcasts, which were carried on CBS Radio back home in the US.

• 15:58Katy Milkman?

  And all of the radio telegraph equipment was loaned to Admiral Byrd without charge. Finally, new transportation technology made traveling in these harsh conditions far more manageable.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Starting with Byrd, you begin what's often called the mechanical age, where the people who are going down there are bringing aircraft with them, and they're more substantial in size, these expeditions during Byrd's era.

• 16:25Katy Milkman?

  So while we don't want to diminish the accomplishments of Richard Byrd, which are really quite extraordinary, it is interesting to consider all the things that were working in his favor during this Antarctic expedition that is primarily remembered for its audacity and harshness.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  You have to really admire how industrious he was and how he was able to face really dangerous conditions. It's really difficult to do the things he did. There's a reason no one's done it before. But he also was really prepared for this type of thing and poised to be successful because of his personal connections, because of his family connections, his friend connections, his education, technology again, and the way that those things helped him put himself in this position where he was this hero, facing the elements by himself for the purpose of knowledge and learning more about Antarctica.

• 17:22Katy Milkman?

  Daniela McKehe is an assistant professor at Texas Tech University. If you'd like to learn more about Richard Byrd's expeditions and see some of the objects he brought with him, check out Daniela's book, which she co-authored with Jean de Palmero, Antarctica: A History in 100 Objects. You can find a link in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.

• 17:47Katy Milkman?

  We brought you this story of Richard Byrd's amazing journey to highlight a universal tendency that's the focus of today's episode. It's the tendency to attend more to obstacles or headwinds that hold us back, like Byrd's malfunctioning generator and loneliness, than to assets or tailwinds that buoy us, like Byrd's incredible connections, which ensured he had every possible technology at his fingertips and made his adventure possible in the first place. This tendency is a bias we have when reflecting on our own experiences and likely also the experiences of other people, projects, companies, and organizations. It's been dubbed the headwinds-tailwinds asymmetry.

• 18:29Katy Milkman?

  My next guest has studied this asymmetry in research with his collaborator and former student, Shai Davidai. Tom Gilovich is the Irene Blacker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. Hi, Tom. Welcome to the podcast.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  It's a pleasure to be here, Katie. Thanks for having me.

• 18:46Katy Milkman?

  Well, I'm really excited to talk about your work on the headwinds-tailwinds asymmetry. But actually, before I ask you to define what that is, I wanted to just ask if you could tell us what you mean by headwinds and by tailwinds when you think about this research.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, the easiest way to describe it is to think about times that you do different types of exercise, like you're cycling or running. And sometimes you're running into the wind. You're facing a headwind. And it usually registers as something that's annoying, like, ah, the wind's in my face. I can't wait until the course changes and the wind's at my back. And when that happens, you feel good for a little bit, and then you quickly adapt to it, and it's out of your mind. The headwind stays on your mind, the tailwind doesn't.

• 19:37Katy Milkman?

  Well, that's really interesting. Okay, so you just described it in terms of the experience of a cycler, but if we're thinking about it in the experience of, say, a student trying to perform well in school or a patient trying to improve their health, how would you think about headwinds and tailwinds in those contexts?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  What are the things that you confront, that you have to pay attention to in order to achieve your objective? The barriers you face, you have to pay attention to them to get over them. The things that are helping you get over that barrier, the things that are lowering the barrier, you don't have to pay attention to those. Life in general. Is a lot like being the life of a runner, that you're aware of the barriers you have to overcome in order to overcome them. And you don't have to be aware of all the things that boost you along.

• 20:31Katy Milkman?

  I think you're sort of already getting to the the heart of the matter, which is, you know, this headwinds, tailwinds asymmetry, but maybe I'll ask you to very explicitly describe what the asymmetry is that you've studied in your search.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Yes, so if you're a person who had siblings and if we asked you, were your parents harder on you or your sibling? And we've actually done a study like this. People recognize there's a general tendency for parents to be harder on the first kid than the second kid, than the third, et cetera, et cetera. But firstborn kids believe that a lot more strongly than later born kids do. So in addition to that general birth order trend, there's also a tendency for people to note, remember, and be bothered by the way that their parents were especially hard on them and easy on their siblings. And you see it in the sports world.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  A former student did a study at Williams College, Ken Savitsky. And he asked all of the intercollegiate athletes how much their sport, how taxing it was in terms of their ability to have a social life, do their coursework, et cetera. And they had them do the same thing for all the sports. And on average, everybody thought their sport was harder than all of the other sports because of the particular difficulties that their sport brought about. They had to be front and center on their minds in order to make it all work. The things that were relatively easy in their sport, they didn't have to pay attention to.

• 22:06Katy Milkman?

  I really love that example. I was actually going to ask if you could tell us about one or two of your favorite research studies that you've used to establish that this asymmetry exists. I really like the sports example, but do you have favorite studies on this asymmetry?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I do. One is a study that's essentially A laboratory version of this thought experiment. I like the thought experiment even more. In California, there's this 211 mile hike from Yosemite Valley to the top of Mount Whitney. And you can hike it from the south to the north or north to the south. And I'm willing to bet that if you asked people who've done one versus the other, and you asked them, what percentage of those 211 miles was uphill versus what percentage was downhill? I don't know what the answer would be, but if you asked about the percentage of uphill of each of them, they have, logically, it has to be 100%.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  But I'm willing to bet a lot of money that those two figures would sum to more than 100%. Each one would think, I hiked a lot of uphill. This is related to Danny Kahneman's idea of attribute substitution. The question, what percentage of the trail was uphill, is hard. But there's a closely related, easier question. What percentage of time did I spend on the trail going up versus down? It takes you longer to hike uphill than downhill. So it could be the case that both of them did spend more than 50% walking uphill. In fact, that's probably true. But that's a different question. We're not asking, what percentage of time did you spend? What about the trail?

• 23:50Speaker 02

  That's just hard to keep track of. So you answer the easier question instead. So we did a laboratory version of that, where we had people complete two tasks. One was a little more annoying and time consuming than the other. And there were a number of different trials of each. And then afterwards, we asked them, what percentage of these things that we just asked you to do were the hard ones? What percentage were the easy ones? And as we expected, the amount of time you spent doing the more annoying things, that registered with you, and people overestimated the number of trials of the harder, more time-consuming task.

• 24:32Katy Milkman?

  So essentially, if I do a series of 10 tasks and half are hard and half are easy, and then you ask what fraction were hard and what fraction were easy, I will overestimate, I'll say it's more than five out of 10, it was six or seven out of 10 that were hard, because I'm fixating on all that extra time and effort that went into the hard ones, and I'm not thinking about the five easy ones that flew by.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 24:57Katy Milkman?

  It's really interesting. What are some of the contexts where you think this asymmetry might matter the most in life?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  It comes up most naturally when we think about what we have to be grateful for, that it's easy to lose sight of all of those things. You know, we are grateful from time to time, of course, but what this suggests is maybe not as much as something like an objective analysis might suggest, and that also easily feeds something that's the opposite of gratitude, which is either, they're sort of twin antonyms of resentment and entitlement. And one of the nice features about gratitude is a lot of research has shown that it's easier for

• 25:45Speaker 02

  us to get in touch with our best selves when we're full of gratitude. It's hard to get in touch with our best self when we're feeling resentful.

• 25:56Katy Milkman?

  I'm wondering if you have any advice for our listeners that you think could help them improve their everyday decisions now that they know about this headwinds, tailwinds asymmetry?

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, humans have a remarkable capacity to zoom in and zoom out. And when some behavioral scientists ask you a question about, you know, what are the advantages and disadvantages you faced, you zoom in on all the details, and that's going to give rise to this kind of bias. But if you zoom out and take stock of your life as a whole, and from that aerial view, if you will, it's easier to see these kinds of tailwinds. And, you know, on your show, you've talked about the Information bias before and people are encouraged to consider the opposite of what

• 26:48Speaker 02

  comes naturally. And so when you ask yourself the question of, is this fair? You naturally think about ways that it's been unfair to you, but those are just at the top of the head. But dig a little deeper to think about what are the ways, what are the hidden ways where you've had an advantage? And we can access them in our most reflective, generous moods. We can summon those things that we have to be grateful for. And when we do, it's easier for us to be that best self that we want to be.

• 27:24Katy Milkman?

  Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to share this research and these fantastic explanations and examples with us today. I've really enjoyed getting to talk to you about this.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Great. It's been fun for me, Katie.

• 27:38Katy Milkman?

  Tom Gilovich is the Irene Blacker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. In addition to being a star behavioral science researcher, he's also the author of several terrific books for general audiences, including The Wisest One in the Room and How We Know What Isn't So. You can find links to Tom's books and to his research on the headwinds-tailwinds asymmetry in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.

• 28:09Katy Milkman?

  Investors often fall victim to the headwinds-tailwinds asymmetry. When your portfolio is doing well, you might attribute it to your investing prowess and not fully consider the bull market at your back. But then in tougher times, you're all too aware of bear market headwinds. To stay cognizant of the ways the phenomenon we explore on Choiceology could be affecting your portfolio and finances, check out the Financial Decoder podcast. You can find it at schwab.com/financialdecoder or just search your favorite podcast app.

• 28:45Katy Milkman?

  The headwinds-tailwinds asymmetry is a tough bias to fight, but I think Tom Gilovich offered excellent advice when he suggested spending a bit more time reflecting on what you have to be grateful for. And the nice thing about spending a bit more time reflecting on gratitude, or counting your blessings, is that not only does it have the potential to help de-bias your judgment, research also suggests it can improve your optimism and life satisfaction. So the next time you're feeling grumpy about an obstacle in your path, or wowed by an obstacle you've seen someone else overcome, take a moment to reflect on the tailwinds in play, and that's likely to leave you better off in more ways than one.

• 29:38Katy Milkman?

  You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack. Next time, I'll speak with University of Delaware professor Jackie Silverman about the power of tracking streaks when we're trying to build habits, and how you can avoid becoming demotivated if you break a streak. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman. Talk to you soon.

• 30:34Katy Milkman?

  For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.