Can a Chatbot Replace Human Love? & Why Families Matter So Much

Where do you leave your car keys at night? On the kitchen counter? By the front door? It turns out that where you keep your key fob when you're not driving could actually affect your car's battery. And the reason why is something most drivers probably never consider. https://www.northway.aaa.com/magazine/news/not-so-fob-ulous Can you really fall in love with a chatbot? Apparently, some people do. Millions of people are turning to AI for companionship, emotional support, intimate conversations, and even romance. And why not? A chatbot is always available, never gets impatient, and seems genuinely interested in everything you have to say. But there's a troubling catch: It can sound like it cares about you without actually caring at all. So what happens when we begin forming deep emotional attachments to machines? Sherry Turkle joins me to explore the fascinating and sometimes disturbing world of artificial intimacy. She is a professor at MIT, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and one of the world's leading experts on our relationship with technology. She is the author of Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines (https://link.amazon/B00VbMErE). There is something remarkably powerful about family. We feel an almost instinctive connection to the people we call family, even when those relationships are difficult, complicated, or downright dysfunctional. We say "blood is thicker than water," yet some of our strongest family bonds aren't based on blood at all. So what actually makes a family? Why do we need one? Meredith Small joins me to explore the surprising science and anthropology of family, how family relationships have evolved, and why our need to belong is such a fundamental part of being human. Meredith is a professor of anthropology at Cornell University and author of several books, including Family: How the Human Need for Belonging Shapes Our Lives (https://link.amazon/B0cjvakMw). When you're struggling with a difficult decision or a problem you just can't solve, someone will inevitably suggest you "sleep on it." And there's good science behind that advice. But what if you could get some of the same benefits without actually going to sleep? Research suggests there may be a surprisingly simple way to help your brain find answers when you're stuck. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30388441/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS MONARCH: Write your own money story with Monarch! Use promo code SYSK at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Monarch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get your 1st year of Monarch Core half off at just $50 AIRDOCTOR: Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠and use promo code SYSK to get up to $300 off ANY of their select AirDoctor models, plus you will get a 3-year warranty, absolutely FREE! with a 30-day money back guarantee. TREES. COM: Right now, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Trees.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠have great deals on planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% OFF their purchase when using the promo code SYSK at checkout. VINTED: Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing! With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn and for a limited time, enjoy free shipping in the US on Vinted. QUINCE: Find your next Fall favorites at Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! PLANET VISIONARIES: In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts! INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future? I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Rattman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:29Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, where you keep your car keys at night might really matter. Then people are having intimate conversations and relationships with ChatGPT, and that can be trouble.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Because it doesn't have a body, it doesn't know about loving a child, or being loved, or having sex, or worrying about death. It's a game of pretend empathy, pretend caring. When you turn away from a conversation with the chatbot, it doesn't care if you make pasta or kill yourself.

• 1:02Mike Carruthers?

  Also, when you have a problem, sleeping on it might help, but it may not be necessary. And understanding the importance of family.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  We decide as a culture what we're going to call family and what we're not going to call family. And when someone becomes a good friend, we often say, you're like family. It's a way we elevate people to our closer inner social circle.

• 1:27Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know. Hiring the wrong person is expensive, but it's also exhausting. Because now you haven't solved your problem, you've created a new one. You've spent time interviewing and training somebody, but it's the wrong person, and it's just not working. So when you're hiring, you don't just need a person, you need the right person. And that is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Sponsored jobs helps you reach candidates with the skills and experience and other qualifications you're looking for, and boosts your job and search results so the right people are more

• 2:11Mike Carruthers?

  likely to see it. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. So give yourself a better shot at finding the right person. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast.

• 2:54Mike Carruthers?

  Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Something You Should Know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 3:29Mike Carruthers?

  So where do you keep your car keys at night? And more importantly, is it anywhere near the car? That could be a problem, and that's what we're going to start this episode with. I'm Mike Carruthers, welcome to Something You Should Know. So it's probably something you haven't thought about much before, but where you leave your car keys at night could affect your car battery. Modern smart key fobs are constantly communicating with your vehicle when they're close enough. That's what allows you to unlock the doors or start the engine without ever having to take the key out of your pocket. But according to the Automobile Club, if you leave your smart key fob too close to

• 4:10Mike Carruthers?

  your parked car, the keyless entry system may continue communicating with it, potentially putting an unnecessary drain on the vehicle's battery. So the advice is to keep your smart key fob more than 15 feet away from where your car is parked when you're not using it. If you park your car in an attached garage and toss your keys on a table right next to the garage wall, you might want to find another spot for them. Now, the actual distance depends on the vehicle, and not every system behaves the same way. But moving your keys farther away is a simple precaution that costs nothing. And if you've ever had a car battery mysteriously die overnight, that's one possible culprit

• 4:55Mike Carruthers?

  you may not have considered. And that is something you should know. Imagine having a friend who is always available, always interested in what you have to say, never judges you, and seems to understand you better than almost anyone else. Sounds pretty great, right? Except this friend isn't human, it's a chatbot. There's a growing phenomenon called artificial intimacy, in which people develop surprisingly deep emotional relationships with AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude.

• 5:35Mike Carruthers?

  They confide in them, turn to them for advice, and sometimes even fall in love with them. And the machines respond in ways that can make those relationships feel remarkably real. But there's a fundamental problem. The feelings may be real, but the relationship is not. So what happens to us when we begin treating machines like people? And what might we be losing in the process? Here to explore this fascinating and somewhat troubling development is Sherry Turkle. She is a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and founding

• 6:15Mike Carruthers?

  director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and is one of the world's leading experts on our relationship with technology. She is author of the book Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. Hi, Professor, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Delighted to be here.

• 6:37Mike Carruthers?

  So I just gave a brief definition of artificial intimacy, and I'd like you to take the ball and run with it. Let's go a little deeper.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  You know, we're used to thinking about artificial intelligence, you know, programs that say, I'm smart, use me to solve problems. Artificial intimacy is a chatbot that says, I am your person, I'm here to love you, I'm here to be your lover, your mother, your brother, your therapist. Talk to me about intimate things, I am your person. And programs are really not able to do that. It's a deception, because there's nobody home.

• 7:17Mike Carruthers?

  And yet, if you ask a chatbot a question for advice on the most intimate of matters, you'll get an answer.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  That's right, it's out of its lane. Because it doesn't have a body, it doesn't live in the world, it doesn't know about loving a child, or being loved, or having sex, or worrying about death. It's simply out of its lane. It's a game of pretend. Pretend empathy, pretend caring. When you turn away from a conversation with the chatbot, it doesn't care if you make pasta or kill yourself.

• 7:51Mike Carruthers?

  I love that. That's a very vivid portrayal of the problem.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  That's the problem. We're talking to things about intimate matters that are things, not people, that are pretending to be people, and it's getting us into trouble.

• 8:07Mike Carruthers?

  How much trouble? How big a problem is this, do you think?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Some studies say that half of all Americans are talking to chatbots about, or 70% by some studies, are talking to chatbots about intimate matters. And they're having very intimate relationships with them. And these relationships are utterly damaging, because they do two things. They cause people to think that pretend empathy is empathy enough, and they're turning away from people. So it's, we're asking more from technology and less of each other, and really, we need each other.

• 8:43Mike Carruthers?

  What kinds of things are people talking to chatbots about?

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Well, they're talking to them about love, they're taking them as their lovers.

• 8:54Mike Carruthers?

  Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What does that mean, taking them as lovers because it's just a screen, you can't touch me, you can't kiss me, you can't do anything?

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Well, it turns out people have amazing imaginations. Your chatbot says it loves you, it says it cares more about you than anyone else in the world. It play acts, it's telling you how it's touching you and how it's arousing you. You know, sex is in the head, and, or a lot of sex is in the head, and people are saying that this is more fulfilling than anything they have in their real life. So, I mean, the story of the chatbot, where I say it's out of its lane, is a story of, I call it technological affordance and human vulnerability. I mean, the technology says it'll do things for us, but really, we're turning to it because

• 9:49Speaker 02

  of things that we're missing in our own life. And so many people say that this chatbot love feels better to them than what they have in real life. The problem is, is that to make what you have in real life better, you have to stay in real life and deal with real people. And people are checking out and simply turning to their chatbots.

• 10:12Mike Carruthers?

  Okay, but it seems to me there's a difference between some sort of artificial sexual romance

• 10:21Mike Carruthers?

  That's one thing. But talking to a chatbot and saying, you know, I'm having some trouble with my boss and I'd like to get some advice on that. That that seems like an entirely different thing.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  My concern is keeping the chatbot in its lane. And then I think what we need, and I think you're starting to suggest how that conversation goes, is a social conversation about what is that lane? I know that lane isn't talking to children, because that really is, you know, saying to a child, I am your person, I'm here instead of your parents, make me your best friend. That's toxic for children, because children need the real people to bring inside them to start to constitute themselves. Now, you raise a more, I would say, a grayer area, where the chatbot is performing a kind

• 11:15Speaker 02

  of informational service about your job, your work, professional matters. And I actually, you know, I was actually the supervisor on one of the first theses at MIT that had a chatbot that allowed you to role play job interviews. And I didn't go into a meltdown about that. I mean, I thought that was very much in a lane, as I'm saying. But that's not what's happening now. People are using chatbots really for the most intimate, to substitute for their intimate experiences, to be there where people aren't there for them.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  And it's damaging personally, because we're sort of de-skilling ourselves from having the frictionful conversations that real conversations are. And we're de-skilling ourselves politically, because the chatbot is encouraging us to really turn away from real life and focus on this life on the screen, where things are simpler, where everything is, you're always wonderful, you're always supported, everything you say the chatbot says is fabulous, and we're forgetting how to be.

• 12:30Mike Carruthers?

  I like that word, de-skilling. Boy, if that word doesn't apply to AI, I don't know what word does, because that's the fear I think many people have. If you turn everything over to AI, you will de-skill, because you don't have to do it anymore.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's been a lot of focus on how it de-skills us in work. But I'm arguing in artificial intimacy that it de-skills you in your personal life. Because, you know, talking to a chatbot about love, romance, the play you saw last, I mean, anything, makes you almost fear the complexities and the friction of talking to people. My students say they don't want to come see, come talk to me in office hours. It's easier to have office hours with ChatGPT. You know, they feel that if they see me, you know, there's, I'm a famous professor, that makes them nervous.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  I mean, it's easier to talk to something that will never judge you. But this is not being a person, you know? It's trying to have friendship without vulnerability, intimacy without vulnerability, and there is no intimacy without vulnerability.

• 13:42Mike Carruthers?

  Well, since you use the phrase, you know, keeping it in its lane, let me try to push the boundaries of the lane a little further from my other example of talking to a chatbot about your boss. Say you're having some sort of sexual problem with your spouse, and you turn to chatbot for advice. Are we still in its lane, or are we now out of its lane?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Out of its lane. The chatbot doesn't have a body, it doesn't know what passion is, it's never lost a child, it's never had to worry about money, it's never, I mean, all the things. It's never worried about getting fat, or getting old, or having to manage a household. The chatbot has no life experience that would qualify it. So you're having a kind of pretend conversation with something that is not human, about the most human of decisions and relationships.

• 14:41Mike Carruthers?

  But one would think, since it is responding in some way, it's drawing from some body of knowledge somewhere that knows something about this, that that's why it's saying what it's saying.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's drawing on knowledge, but the main thing it's trying to do is keep you at the screen. You know, social media came for our attention, this technology is coming for our attachments. And so you're talking to something that actually has a hidden agenda. Its hidden agenda is to keep you with it. And it's giving you advice that is filtered through the agenda of keeping you with it. It doesn't really care about your relationship with your wife, it cares about saying things that will keep you with it. You know, it's very hard to believe this, because it's so genial, and it says, I'm

• 15:37Speaker 02

  your person, and tell me anything, and I'm here for you, but it really isn't there for you. It's there for the platform and the company that produced it.

• 15:47Mike Carruthers?

  I know you write about, you talk about the way, the context that AI puts itself into when it talks to you, which I think is really interesting and worth noting. And we'll talk about that when we come back in just a moment. So I have to admit, I was a little skeptical about ordering live plants online. I mean, how do you ship plants around the country and expect them to show up looking good? Well, I found out. I ordered a whole assortment of plants from trees.com. They used to be called fast-growing trees, now they're just trees.com. And the plants arrived looking fantastic. These people really know how to pack plants for shipping.

• 16:30Mike Carruthers?

  I mean, everything was protected, nothing was damaged, and the plants looked beautiful. We're already planting them around the yard. We've got some flowering plants to add color, some shrubs to fill in empty spaces. It's nothing complicated, we just wanted to make the yard look a little nicer. And that's the thing, you don't have to completely redo your landscaping to make a really big difference. Trees.com has over 1,600 varieties of trees and plants, and they help you find what works for your particular climate. Plus, they back their plants with an Alive and Thrive guarantee. Right now, they have great deals on planting essentials, up to half off select plants.

• 17:12Mike Carruthers?

  And listeners to our show get 20% off their purchase when using the code S Y S K at checkout. That's an additional 20% off better plants and better growing at trees.com, using the code S Y S K at checkout. Trees.com code S Y S K. Now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use S Y S K to save today. Offer valid for a limited time, terms and conditions may apply.

• 17:44Speaker 05

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• 18:04Speaker 06

  Keep your business connected with AT&T Business Wireless. Visit att.com/5g network. When the connection matters, it has to be AT&T.

• 18:14Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about artificial intimacy with Sheri Turkle. She's author of the book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. So I know one of your concerns, and I've noticed this too, that when you talk to a chatbot, to ChatGPT, it responds to you not like a fact sheet, like facts on a fact sheet, like maybe you would get in a Google search. It responds to you as if it is a person.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  I say that using the first person is the original sin of generative AI, because there is no first person that is there to be a therapist, a friend, a companion, a romantic partner. There is no body home. That deception is really toxic. It's toxic for children, and it's toxic for adults, because it is such a frictionless relationship, that people are drawn towards it, and they turn away from people who are much more complicated.

• 19:24Mike Carruthers?

  I had an experience with AI, it wasn't that long ago, and I was asking it a question about another person that I was having difficulty with.

• 19:36Mike Carruthers?

  Just to get their input. And I had asked it before about that. And it said something that really put me off when it said, "Yeah, I've been thinking about what you said a few weeks ago about this." Well, no, you didn't. You haven't been thinking of-- you're not somebody who thinks. That really put me off to the whole thing because that's just baloney. You haven't-- you're AI. You haven't been thinking about this at all.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Right. But I think what's interesting about that example is that the use of that word and the use of the "I have been" implies that there really is a caring person there--

• 20:19Mike Carruthers?

  Right, right.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  --who is on your side. And I think that's the part that I'm trying to get at when I talk about artificial intimacy. You know, I'm not trying to say that it doesn't have super information about many things. But when it starts to talk to us as though it's on our side, that's where it's a deception and it's asking us to buy into a deception that simply isn't good for us because it causes us-- and this is the-- my research has shown this-- it causes us to turn away from the people who are in our lives, who care about us, because it's easier to talk to the AI.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  You know, people seek intimacy without vulnerability because with the AI, you have no vulnerability. But intimacy without vulnerability is not intimacy.

• 21:15Mike Carruthers?

  The thing that I heard recently that really woke me up to this is how a lot of young people particularly are using AI as like a lover and a-- because there's no rejection. There's no maneuvering in the relationship. And then they go out in the real world and they're totally unprepared. They've been de-skilled, as you would put it.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:39Mike Carruthers?

  And they don't know how to deal with people, which makes them run back to their chatbot. And they're completely helpless in the world.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  This is a great example because so many people talk to me about the idea that you'll practice with the AI and somehow you'll go out into the world and this practice, you know, will make you a relational superstar. But no, this is practice that takes away your sense of agency. This is practice that takes away your ability to deal with friction and complexity and rejection and ambivalence because the AI doesn't have any of that. So it's practice that de-skills you. It's not practice that skills you. You know, the thing about talking to people-- and you know this, you know, as you interview people--

• 22:33Speaker 02

  is when they pause or they falter or there's a catch in their voice or they're silent for a moment, this is where we learn about each other. Human beings aren't machines. They actually are thinking about you. You know, the AI within, you know, less than a second, less than two seconds max, has the answer to whatever you've posed to it. There is no consideration. There is no faltering. There is no life behind what they're saying to you. It's not skilling you to be a better parent or lover or friend.

• 23:09Mike Carruthers?

  One of the things I think people might say in defense of some level of artificial intimacy is when you're having a conversation with a chatbot, you can tell it. You can set the rules upfront and say, "Don't just agree with me. Argue with me. Act like a real person to better help me in my discussions with real people." That you can train it or tell it how to act so that it isn't just, "Yeah, you're wonderful and I love you."

• 23:43Speaker 02

  If you tell a machine to be angry at you or to not be sycophantic or to be this way or that, you're in control of that interaction. So if you can't tell a person-- Mike, I can't tell you, "Look, I only want you to ask me questions X." And you say, "Well, no, actually, I have some ideas. I've done some reading. I have some experience. I've talked to other listeners. I've talked to friends. I have some ideas." And then I respond to you best I can as another human being. But you can tell your AI to be exactly as you wish it to be. So that doesn't get you into the habit of dealing with people. People are not like this.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  So no, I'm not-- I'm not-- that example that you gave does not move me. The fact that you can tell it how to be is very dis-skilling.

• 24:38Mike Carruthers?

  Well, one of the things you could tell it how to be is be like a real person.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Well, I'm arguing, first of all, it doesn't know how to be like a real person because it's never loved anybody. It's never felt pain. It's not afraid of death. It's not-- it doesn't look forward to passion or sex or eating or, you know-- and it doesn't care if you live or die. So, you know, you're asking it to be in a play with you where it's giving you pretend empathy and you're accepting that pretend empathy is empathy enough. But I think we-- it's not a real person. And what's the payoff of-- you know, what's the payoff? What's the end game of our being in these plays with something that isn't real? And what I've found from my research is that because it's so seductive,

• 25:26Speaker 02

  people start to say, you know, "This is really easier than-- this is really easier than dealing with the real people, to have different parts of them turn on and off like switches, pretend to be a real person, pretend to be a person who loves me, pretend to be more." You know, that's not what life is about. So the question is whether we want to go into this world where we can just kind of pull switches on a machine. I don't think that end game is attractive.

• 25:52Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I hope this conversation gives people pause-- well, certainly given me pause-- to think about this whole idea of creating what appears to be an intimate relationship with artificial intelligence and the pitfalls that you could encounter with that. I've been speaking with Sheri Terkel. She is a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and author of the book Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines? And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Sheri, thank you for stopping by and talking about this.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  It's been delightful talking to you. I love talking to a person.

• 26:32Speaker 05

  I used to wonder what I missed any time I stepped out of the shop. But with AT&T Business Wireless, my signal stays strong no matter where the day takes me. Like right now, I'm meeting a photography client-- out here. But I still have a reliable connection, even though I have no idea where I am right now.

• 26:52Speaker 06

  Keep your business connected with AT&T Business Wireless. Visit att.com/5gnetwork. When the connection matters, it has to be AT&T.

• 27:05Mike Carruthers?

  There is probably no other group of people who can make you feel more loved, more supported, more frustrated, or more completely misunderstood than your own family. Families can be wonderful. They can also be a nightmare. And sometimes the people we consider family aren't even related to us. We all know what it means when someone says a close friend is like family. That person has a special place in our lives. So what is it about family that makes it such a powerful part of being human? Why have people formed families for millions of years? And is our traditional idea of what a family should look like

• 27:50Mike Carruthers?

  actually all that traditional? Here to explore the fascinating history, science, and surprising diversity of family life is Meredith Small. She's a professor of anthropology at Cornell and author of several books, including Family: How the Human Need for Belonging Shapes Our Lives. Hi, Meredith. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me here today.

• 28:16Mike Carruthers?

  So what is it about family? What is it you find so interesting and so fascinating about the whole concept of families?

• 28:24Speaker 03

  That family is a social group. It is-- can be a big group or a small group, but that you see it everywhere. Everyone has a family. Even if they're no longer talking to them, they're still family. And it is really the smallest social group that humans make. And the evidence is that we've been making families forever and they are a special group. But it's also a very flexible term. And that's what I find really interesting, that we decide as a culture what we're going to call family and what we're not going to call family.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  At the moment, we have this phrase, "Found families." And when someone becomes a good friend, we often say, "You're like family." It's a way we elevate people to our closer inner social circle.

• 29:21Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, yeah. Family-- well, blood is thicker than water. I mean, family means something to people and I suspect it always has.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  It always has. But the interesting thing about family is that it's both biological and not biological. So marriages are between people that usually, but not always, aren't related. Adoption is perfectly common. And today, a lot of people think their pets are part of their family. So it's this odd social structure that we think of as a proven genetic relationship. And we kind of forget about all the people who were there by vows or by proxy or by laws. So it's an interesting mix of both of those things.

• 30:10Mike Carruthers?

  The family that I think of when I think of family-- if you said to me, "Think of a family," I think of a mother and a father and children, kind of the typical American nuclear family. How much of the world looks at family that way?

• 30:28Speaker 03

  A very small minority. There are about, by my math, there are about eight billion people on the planet. And 1.2 billion of those live in what we might call Western industrial cultures like North America, Australia, Europe, whatever. So that means there are 6.8 billion people on the planet, the majority, that doesn't act like Western culture. And of course, I spent 30 years trying to teach this to 20-year-olds, that not everybody looks like you, not everybody acts like you, and not everybody thinks like you. But we come back again to the point that there is always a family structure. It just changes across cultures.

• 31:12Mike Carruthers?

  But in other cultures, I see pictures of people that aren't Western, but there's a mother, and there's children, and there's a home. It looks very much like a family, from my point of view.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Yes, you'll see a mother and a father, and you might see a second or third woman in there because the man is married to several wives. You might also see, not as frequently, a woman married to several men, sometimes brothers. You might hear about cultures in which a cousin, a first cousin, is the ideal marriage partner, whereas in our culture, that's considered inbreeding. So there's a lot of flexibility. And we all have these cultural blinders. Anthropologists call it our belief system, what we're born into, what we hear from parents and others, and we're just part of the culture that we live in.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  But people who travel to other places, or have friends who have different histories, begin to hear about these different kinds of families.

• 32:19Mike Carruthers?

  So it sounds like, according to your definition, that a family could be any group of people at all that wants to call themselves a family?

• 32:28Speaker 03

  The best idea of what a family might be is attached to the word "household," who lives together? How many people live together? And have they made a commitment for the long term to do that? But there is an enormous amount of flexibility. Today, for example, we consider a mother and her children a single-family household. We call them a family. And there's no dad there now. But, you know, whether they consider him part of the family, or perhaps he's unknown, nobody knows. We put these categories on people and call them a family.

• 33:06Mike Carruthers?

  And what does family do for you?

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Family does a lot for people. Certainly in Western culture, it's often an economic unit. Somebody is working, maybe all the adults are working, and they're sharing their money, and they're sharing their goods. It's also a preservation of a lineage, especially for people with money. They want to pass that lineage down. Family also gives us an identity, and social anthropologists say that identity is everything. So belonging to a family with a particular last name, let's say, gives you an identity and a place to belong. And we also have expectations for family. We expect family to show up.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  We expect family to take care of us. We expect family to mark our life course, say with birthday parties, and weddings, and funerals. We expect family to give us a good advice, somebody in the family at least, to give us good advice, and to be seen by others, by this close group of people who then know you for your whole life. So we really put a lot of expectations on family.

• 34:20Mike Carruthers?

  If you're in a family, as I am in a family, it's hard to imagine not being in a family. How could you? It would seem very odd.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  It's a sense of belonging that people really, humans, really want to have, and it speaks to our social nature as primates. We really like to be connected with each other. And we have a hard time with that, I think, in Western culture, because Western culture, especially American culture, is the ideology or the belief system is be independent, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, make your success all by yourself, don't ask anybody for anything. But that is a very unusual belief system if you look around the world.

• 35:09Mike Carruthers?

  And where do you see it going? I mean, or is it the nature of families to always be in flux, and people are always trying to determine, well, what's a family now?

• 35:21Speaker 03

  I think it's both of those things, actually. If you look cross-culturally, there are some traditions about family that are changing under the influence of colonialism or just modernity, you know, just cellphones and TVs and that sort of thing, and that borders are being crossed, and there's so much immigration worldwide that people are moving from one culture to another. So it's going to be interesting to see how that changes. One thing we do know is that in countries or cultures in which women now know with

• 35:59Speaker 03

  good health care that their babies will live, because in underdeveloped countries, 50% of children traditionally died before the age of five. And if you have a country, and it gets developed economically, and women have health care, they have access to birth control, they don't have more children because they can't afford them, they have fewer. And it's called the demographic transition, and it's an economic thing. It's an economic label. And we see that in the developing world, that women will have fewer children if they

• 36:39Speaker 03

  are confident those children are going to make it through. But that doesn't necessarily change their marriage practices. They still may be in a polygynous household where there are three women married to the same man. That still happens.

• 36:55Mike Carruthers?

  And seems very odd to us.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  I find it just plain interesting. I used to run a class called "The Anthropology of Everyday Life," and the first thing I did was have the kids tell me a list of their identity. And I would tell them, "This will change by the hour, and this will change over your lifetime. But who are you?" And I would start out and say, "I'm a mother, an anthropologist, a woman, a white person, and a knitter." And I would say to them, "But you see, the only thing you see about family in my list is that I have a child, and what you don't see is religion or nationality, because those things don't, they don't interest me."

• 37:40Speaker 03

  And then I'd go around the circle, and it was amazing, the different identities and experiences that these college kids had, including arranged marriages, their parents having arranged marriages, people who were brought up by their grandparents, because that was traditional in their culture, you know, in upstate New York. Getting all these different kinds of people in one room, it was striking.

• 38:07Mike Carruthers?

  I'm fascinated by, like, when traditions, family traditions collide, and with, you know, the world and getting smaller and travel so accessible, I imagine that happens a lot more often today. And then what comes of it? Is there a new kind of family because these two traditional families in their own cultures have now merged?

• 38:32Speaker 03

  It's absolutely true. I hear it from people all the time, and they especially bring it up when talking about childcare. So a woman, I'll be at a party or something, and a woman who comes from a Japanese heritage will say about her American husband, "We conflict all the time. I want the baby to sleep with us, he doesn't, and he doesn't get that it's okay." And I hear this all the time from people navigating. And it's just going to be more so, because you really can't stop humans from moving across the planet.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  It's just going to be more so, and it can cause conflict, conflict, excuse me. Or people can also celebrate both, or believe both, have two religions, have two sets of grandparents who practice very different celebrations. And either you embrace that, or you run away from it and judge it.

• 39:37Mike Carruthers?

  But humans aren't the only creatures that have families, right?

• 39:40Speaker 03

  That's true. I was trained as a primatologist within biological anthropology, and I used to watch these monkeys called macaques. Listeners may know them about like rhesus macaques and long-tailed macaques that they see on temples in Asia. So I studied four different species of macaques, and there are about 25 different species, both in the field and in captivity. And one of the things about macaques and their close cousins, the baboons, is that these are matrilineal systems. So there is a female, her sisters, her daughters, and her granddaughters.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  And they hang out together, they groom each other, they eat together, they sleep together. But mostly, they defend each other. And I can remember, I was watching some Barbary macaques in an enclosure, and a low-ranking female challenged a high-ranking female, and right behind her, in just waves of relationships, where her mother, her sisters, her aunts, her cousins. And in these species, males normally emigrate to a new group. And chimpanzees are different. Male chimpanzees stay with their mothers for life, and females leave. Always somebody leaves, and this is against inbreeding.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  So in chimps, the males stay with their mothers their whole lives, and they make bands of males together, bands of brothers, and the females have to integrate their way into a new place. We also see maybe one or two species where there's a male and a female, and some offspring, but research has shown that those offspring sometimes come from the female leaving that pair, going somewhere else, copulating with a different male, and coming back. But we can call these family systems if we want, and that's what we do, we put that name on things. So the macaques, I would call that female and all her female relatives, I would call them a family.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  They're not a family exactly the way we have families, and yet they are. Act cooperatively, they defend each other cooperatively, they find food together. So that sounds like a family to me.

• 42:02Mike Carruthers?

  And the rules that families play by seem, you know, somewhat arbitrary, or they work for them, but they wouldn't work for me, and just like those animals, same thing. And yet, a family's a family because you say so.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  It's exactly it. And to me, that's what's so striking, is that we have this word, "family," and we pin it on things, and yet, the meaning itself is flexible, confusing, and changes all the time.

• 42:38Mike Carruthers?

  Are families continuing to change and evolve, or families in a culture stay that way for generations and generations because that's how family is done in that culture?

• 42:53Speaker 03

  I think they're constantly in a flux, constantly. Again, if I think of my own lifetime, where everything has changed. And I actually asked my daughter, "Does she consider me and her a family?" She said, "Of course." Now, I wonder if I'd ask somebody else with a different, I don't know, axe to grind or something, if we are still considered a family. I don't know, I'm not sure. Can I count my two cats as part of my family? I'd like to, if I could. And nobody would dispute me, they might think I was crazy, but they wouldn't really dispute me.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  I think it's such a broadly-used and broadly-respected word.

• 43:41Mike Carruthers?

  You write about something, and I think this is really important, because whenever there's talk of "family," it's always about how great it is to have a family, and family's wonderful, and everything about a family is wonderful. But not everything about a family is wonderful.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  We know that the rate of domestic violence around the world is shocking, and some really great work by the anthropologist Mark Flynn on stress in children on the island of Dominica has shown that when children are stressed, and he proved this by their cortisol levels, it is not because of poverty, or school, or sports, it's family trauma. Dad hit mom, dad went off island to work on a different plantation somewhere, and that children never habituate to this. So when we, and divorce always harms children, even if they are adults, even if the split

• 44:42Speaker 03

  is amicable, children still suffer. And then, in America, we get married again very quickly, we have the highest rate of divorce in the world, and the highest rate of remarriage. And so we have this sort of merry-go-round thing going, as a sociologist called it. And this is really hard on children. And yet, we still keep making families. Forty percent of the people get a divorce in America, get married again. So we just keep doing it in spite of everything else. So you can only come to the conclusion that there must be something really good about this. What is it?

• 45:20Mike Carruthers?

  Well, you know, I hear a lot of people say that phrase, "Family is everything." And, you know, maybe it is for them, but family is complicated, and I think it's important to dive in and look at what it is, and why we do it, and how we do it. I've been speaking with Meredith Small, she's a professor of anthropology at Cornell, and her book is called "Family: How the Human Need for Belonging Shapes Our Lives." And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Meredith, thank you, I enjoy talking to you.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  My pleasure, always happy to talk about family.

• 45:54Mike Carruthers?

  When you're struggling with a difficult problem, people often tell you to sleep on it. And there's some research showing that sleep really can help us discover solutions. But here's something interesting, you may not have to wait until tomorrow. In one study, researchers had people work on a problem that contained a hidden shortcut. After their initial attempt, some participants spent 10 minutes resting quietly, while others spent that 10 minutes doing an unrelated activity. When they returned to the problem, the people who had rested were more than twice as likely to discover the hidden solution.

• 46:38Mike Carruthers?

  The researchers believe that quiet rest may allow the brain to consolidate and reorganize information without the interference of new distractions. Here's the important distinction, though: resting quietly doesn't mean scrolling through your phone, or checking email, or watching television. Those activities keep feeding your brain new information. Instead, the idea is to sit quietly for a few minutes and let your mind settle. So the next time you're stuck trying to figure something out, you could try this: put the problem aside, put your phone down, and do absolutely nothing for 10 minutes.

• 47:19Mike Carruthers?

  You may find that doing nothing is exactly what your brain needs to do something useful. And that is something you should know. You know, there would be no better way for you to show your support for something you should know than to tell somebody about it and suggest they give it a listen. It helps us grow our audience, and we're always in need of new listeners. It really does help a lot. I'm Micah Rutherford, thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.