And the Ride is for Free

Welcome to the ultimatum game

the ultimatum game is a technique that’s used to pretty much judge the fairness of how we deal with each other and you can well imagine just taking these two words

ultimatum and game that we shouldn’t take it seriously but of course we all know that games are taken extremely serious and the ultimatum of course is either you do it or there are consequences so within this game or this technique we’re trying to figure out how do we come to some sort of compromise

and because it’s an ultimatum very often the results are either all or nothing so what are the possible results that we can get either we split it down the middle or we might go ahead and say they actually did something that was quite notable I don’t need half or whatever it may be and as a general rule of thumb

following the 80 20 rule we do not want to end up on that side of the 20 so very often 20 percent is not accepted so I just finished reading a book by Jennifer Jacquet, it’s called is shaming necessary and I’ll be talking about the book later on in this program but in any case, the author describes not just the game but a scenario that was put together that was actually quite disturbing she describes the game

and mentions that we as human beings depending upon whether we feel that we’re talking to a human being or if we’re talking to work a computer our reaction will be different so who

do you think we are going to renege on more would it be the human being

or the computer well the computer is the master of the universe

and through that is the master of reneging meaning that based upon that of what was described in this book if we have the feeling that we are talking to a computer and a computer makes this an offer we will by nature accept a lower offer from a computer than we would from a human being and apart from that being a very sorry state I started to think about that a bit and I think part of it is that we feel that we can converse with human beings but we have no chance against technology you have entered the realm

of the tipping point

my name is Mike Boyle and our show today is called

and the ride is for free

and before I go into the subject of free riding and some of the corollaries to the subject I’d like to go ahead and tell you a story of something that just happened today started yesterday but it culminated today so as you can very well imagine due to our situation where in spite of going through our fourth lockdown where

I personally am still trying to get my bearing straight and there’s probably more baggage that we’re carrying around that we care to admit and so yesterday was a little bit difficult I have to admit it was a little bit difficult so I came home and I was talking to my wife and I said I don’t feel like I really got anything done today and I was remissing into everything that went wrong

which of course means that I fit in quite well into the scenery

being in Vienna and then finally went to bed and I woke up and I woke up very early and i’m thinking the whole time that’s not enough sleep and i started debating should i try to sleep a little bit longer but i knew that i would never win this battle that i would probably have to work at it for about an hour and a half in best case scenario i would get maybe 30 more minutes of sleep in and I would feel worse than I did at that time so I said let’s leave it and I put on an audiobook that of somebody that I’ve talked about in previous shows somebody that I’m truly enamored with and her name is Brene Brown and her subject is vulnerability which goes of course quite well into these topics that I’ve been talking about recently and in fact apart from vulnerability she talks about shame and i will definitely be talking about that so i turned the audio book on and what did she mention she mentioned that

the biggest challenge that we have today

is a question of scarcity

and i thought yep okay fine i can buy that but then she took this concept of scarcity and she turned it around in a certain way that i thought was extremely revealing she was not referring to having not having enough energy she was not referring to the climate climate change she was not referring to anything physical along those lines

she was talking about something very personal, personal in the respect that these are tapes that go through our heads very often

in spite of us perhaps trying to pretend that this is not part of our repertoire and then she continued to mention yes that we do not get enough exercise we do not produce enough we do not get enough sleep blah blah blah and so I’m listening to this and and then she comes straight out and she says do you know the feeling but before you go to bed you said i didn’t get enough done today and then you wake up and you said I didn’t get enough sleep and to go wow she just described me

and i wanted to share that with you because i think it has a lot to do

with today’s subject and in fact even if it’s not to be recognized perhaps in a transactional way I will try my best to shoehorn it into the conversation as we talked last week about the concept of free riders to make sure that we’re all working with the same definition that we feel that there are individuals that are getting something for nothing the example i gave the one that I concentrated on primarily was coming from Garrett Hardin who wrote a paper on the subject titled The Tragedy of the Commons and he describes a pasture where if given the chance we will

destroy those things that belong to all of us simply because there are always a few individuals we call them very often bad apples

that will ruin it for everybody and I mentioned last week that I

do not believe that certain individuals are born free riders rather I believe that we are all free riders. If given the opportunity we will relish in the fact of actually getting something for nothing so let’s not pretend that we’re talking about a specific group and then the semblance to that of what’s been taking place here in Austria over the last week is purely incidental

but if we agree that we are all free riders in our hearts of hearts then we need to come up with better structures to address the question itself and in fact, one could argue that if anything if we’re all born free-riders then that’s part of our disposition then what we should really do is make sure that we do not have a situation where that can be exploited so I’d like to go ahead and explain another theory this one’s coming from Scott Page he is a professor at the University of Michigan and talks about a lot of subjects that are near and dear to my heart he’s a big aficionado of the concept of co-creation and he came up with a theory which is called the Standing Ovation Theory

and within this theory, I’m going to describe his theory in the form of a theater and we get to the close of the performance and so if you can imagine we’re together in a theater the piece is finished and inevitably you have a group unless it was really bad you have a group that will stand up and start applauding we can argue that okay so what so they think it’s great but the real question in this is also tied to something that Mark Granovetter put together that it’s not the first individual or the first group that gets up and starts with certain actions, it’s the second one is the second group or the second individual who will join them who feel inspired

by the initial actions and they decide that they want to be part it part of it so within this idea the standing ovation theory let’s put them into sixths so the sixth of this of the audience stands up and starts applauding and they were so enthusiastic that the next sixth decides to join them so now we are no longer at 1 6 but rather at two-sixths or one-third

again score two-thirds people still sitting one-third standing and applauding

well that momentum of the second group going ahead and joining the first in applauding

becomes an impetus for the next group to join

so now we have let’s say two-thirds of the audience standing up and applauding

now

what is the last third what are they thinking i believe that one-sixth of them or half of the last group they’re thinking actually it wasn’t that great but they’re so excited we might as well just go ahead and join them so now what’s the score five six are standing one sixth are sitting so what do you think the last group the the last six what they what do they do well nobody wants to be ostracized nobody wants to be excluded and so they will say actually i didn’t like it at all but I don’t want to stick out so I won’t applaud but at least I’ll stand so that means now we have a hundred percent standing to close this piece what does this have to do with free-riding you might be asking at this point if we agree within our society that inclusiveness is very important and inclusiveness is one of the reasons why we do a lot of what we do it’s not based upon anything that’s actually taking place cognitively I mean if we look at the behavior very often

we have no choice but not to think that there’s no cognitive actions actually taking place so it’s all tied to belonging and being part of whatever group that we identify ourselves with and of course the corollary would be

if we strive towards inclusiveness in whatever group or whatever tribe we see ourselves being part of then the worst thing in the world that could ever happen is being excluded and you see that within the example i just gave you with the standing ovation theory you can consider all of those individuals who would attend a certain theater piece to be part of a tribe they made a conscious decision to be there at the theater so there was a clear identity

tied to the genre tied to perhaps the actors could be a number of different factors

but there’s a sense of inclusiveness there and if we’re looking at an inclusive group the last thing we want to have happen to us is to be banished or excluded so then I raised the question for certain free riders in the impetus of why they are trying to get something for nothing which we agree is something that’s innate in all of us could that possibly be the biggest fear that the free-rider could have of being excluded and of course, we have within our society always certain individuals or groups

that relish in being on the outside and in fact the the inclusionary part is that we do not abide by these certain rules and so

we do not belong to that group but we belong to our own group

and with that basically it’s how their things are set up so we follow that path in trying to better regulate

the common good or those things that belong to all of us and we know that this concept of free riding

which is innate in all of us is something that has to be curtailed well then we have to go ahead and raise the question how can we do it exclusion obviously is one and if we think about

how things are set up we

we identify of course not just with our group but there are clear norms that this group has those values that the group believes in and i would argue a fair amount of the polarization that we have today is not tied to having different norms i believe in

for the most part, we do but we’ve separated the norms part from the identity part

and that has triggered the big divide as I mentioned at the beginning just finished reading a book by Jennifer Jacquet and the name of the book is called Is Shaming Necessary and here I have to be honest I was a little bit hesitant before I started reading this book because of people like Brene Brown and this feeling that I have that shame is a vehicle that we use in society to keep people in their place and so not only is it is it extremely destructive but you really have to go ahead and question the actual use regardless of whoever we’re talking about

and so the author refers to

a certain scenario when we talk about the big players or maybe as perhaps as a precursor this is looking at the problems we have towards Let’s call it climate change because that’s only the symptom but the the roots of us using fossil fuels and in wasting energy and how do we

get a handle on all this and so Jennifer Jacquet gives numerous examples of how shaming of corporations allows for the behavior of those companies to be altered and she comes up with a comparison

of how that shame is actually deployed and what kind of effect it has on us as individuals and one could theoretically say that the shame of the company could be the guilt

that you and I have and so if the company is shamed then we would feel guilty in actually going ahead, going and buying their products still and to alleviate our guilt we make a conscious decision not to buy the product so I started thinking about that last part the guilt and the reason why we perform certain actions and i raised the question to all of you

what the that value is and to what degree perhaps there might be a certain amount of manipulation to be found behind that we have of course for a number of years various types of certification i’ll use the word certification for lack of a better term that helps us to alleviate that guilt if we were not able to perform as we think we should getting back to the example I gave from my day yesterday then is it possible to go ahead and take that and put a band-aid on it to make us feel better obviously donations is very often used as a vehicle by which we said okay well we we have much more quality of life instead of feeling guilty about somebody an individual or a group that might not have the same

quality of life as we do then we’ll we will go ahead and give them some money

in the form of a donation

and with that it allows us to alleviate this guilt and of course from an ecological perspective we know this one quite well we have of course the fair trades of this world or this whatever might be comparable and please do not get me wrong I have nothing against fair trade quite the opposite

I’m looking at the actual rationale that we have in going ahead and buying products simply because we have that brand

located very prominently on the packaging

and of course it’s all tied to the inclusiveness and it’s tied to the reputation that we’re trying to develop within our tribe

because people like us buy products like that and if we’re not seen buying products like that then of course we have the fear

that we might be excluded and that’s what’s really driving us it has nothing to do with the products per se it has nothing to do with that little emblem to be found on the packaging it has everything to do with our reputation

and that is something that we will donate a number of resources to up to uphold so let’s follow this concept of shaming

and guilt and free riding and let’s see where it takes us Does shaming always work?
if you have somebody within your own group that group that you identify with if the shaming is coming from your own group i would argue yes that would be very effective I’m not quite sure if that was the method that should ever be used with individuals corporates are not individuals corporates are an entity among itself in the representation of things that are not very good those are

those are things that should be attacked whenever possible in whatever form they might be raising their ugly heads and again I’m not going to be talking about next last Friday but if you have a situation where the shaming is coming from the outside what kind of effect could it have and here I would argue that it actually has an inverse effect and I believe that is basically what we see within our society today which has become unfortunately very pronounced here in Austria over the last two years close to two years and we’ve seen the tendency in other societies most notably following the election that took place in 2016. while we’re talking about 45 let’s stay with the subject of shame, you would think that for somebody who was performing such actions in such a blatant way

that shame should have raised its ugly head but it didn’t that shame became a badge of honor

that election of 2016

was instrumental in a number of ways although the results were a tipping point the actions as such go much farther back and you can see from that of what took place apart from the fact that we could not believe that something like that could ever really happen it’s a question of cognitive dissonance but we were all helping the cause the cause that we thought would never happen the cause that we, if we knew, would try we would try to curtail it with all the energy we have and so we continued

to make that situation infinitely worse and I raise the example of

what the democratic candidate who we thought was a shoo-in Hillary Clinton what she called the group that supported trump she called them deplorables do you know what happened after that that group looked at this moniker and they wore it as a badge of honor they would put together t-shirts we are the deplorables

so that’s a great example of how shame could actually backfire and in fact this one is quite notable because if we go back to

the example i gave when we could even go to the standing ovation theory that we know that individuals can only be ostracized by somebody in the group and can be forced to do things that they would never do otherwise simply because they didn’t do not want to stick out the do not want to be excluded

and we had a great example recently from number 45. this had to have been a few months ago Trump was giving a speech in front of his supporters

and the subject of vaccination came up and for those of you perhaps have followed what took place prior to the actual election in 2020 that

he apparently did get COVID 19. and that was a way for him to garner sympathy or so what it appeared and a number of us would act were actually questioning whether he really did get the coronavirus or not well in any case trump got up in front of one of his supporters giving a speech and made the case for vaccination and then it got very interesting and not too dissimilar to the standing ovation theory so sixth of the audience started booing and it didn’t take long for the the booing to gather some sort of a momentum it never got to the point of where all of the participants were booing because and if you ever have a chance you should take a look at that video because the look that Trump had on his face once the booing took place was a clear indicator of how we do have the vehicle to change things he started backtracking and he said oh that’s okay it’s your right and try to deflect the subject so for me, that was real proof that if we’re using shame as a vehicle

then we need to make sure that it’s within the same group

so if we look at our current situation tied to co2

and how

the burden is continuously thrown at the consumer and don’t get me wrong we’re not looking to shirk any responsibility but let’s be honest folks

where does the real problem live we’re talking about volume there’s some stats that I saw recently stating that the vast majority of the co2 the excessive co2 that’s being produced is coming from roughly 70 companies and interestingly enough a fair amount of these companies

are owned by the citizenry in other words they’re not private companies but they’re actually owned by a government and of course we have that situation here we don’t really talk about it but we do so where does the inclusiveness come through

if we are able to name and blame

those that are truly responsible that they have no place to hide that they do not have the ability anymore to go ahead and create vehicles of guilt that are thrusted upon us that we suck up and take on because we do not want to be excluded then there’s a good case for shaming here there’s a good case because we’re not talking about human beings and feelings anymore folks we’re talking about an agenda and if we’re trying to change behavior

then we seriously need to go ahead and think about what vehicles we have at our disposal and we also need to think about how those vehicles are being used to tug on all these points that I’ve been referring to so far today can we have some sort of association between these points to better understand how we can truly feel empowered we have those examples of individuals

who are performing what’s called positive deviance, deviance means outside of the norm and i think that you would agree with me that some of the norms

that we have are not based upon anything cognitive not it’s not something that we’ve actually thought about but rather something that we’ve been carrying around for a long long time and it’s something that floats around in our subconscious and part of the goal has to be taking it from that subconscious and bring it to the forefront

well those individuals within our society who are willing to be ostracized they’re willing to be excluded they’re willing to be not included or the threat that they would not be included within the mainstream well they’re willing to take that on

and we’ve all seen this movie before folks

some group or perhaps even an individual will go ahead and state that they will not take it anymore

so what does that thought process look like for us? our first reaction is well that’s not possible well we have to take it which of course is a knee-jerk reaction

very understandable. Understandable, not excusable. big difference. so these actions are complete cognitive dissonance we could not imagine that somebody could actually refuse so that’s step number one and I would argue that step number two would be

maybe shame or guilt

how come we never questioned it

and don’t lie don’t tell me that those types of thoughts have never gone through your mind and I’ll be honest with you I could think of I don’t know how many times that I have found myself in that particular situation

where I thought how could I be so stupid as to follow something that

makes no sense I did not spend any energy in a cognitive thought process and actually evaluating what we were all doing so that’s step number two let’s go to step number three this is where revenge comes through because of course those in power once we start questioning those things that we just did automatically once we start questioning them then they all start to get very very nervous

then they pump up the volume

big time and then that’s when the media reports come through in trying to

make that individual or that group outliers because what they’re trying to do is

activate that knee-jerk reaction that seems to exist in the deep in the bowels of all of us

some are able to recognize a little bit quicker than others but it would be a lie to say that none of us are not afflicted

because that group sees that their control is being lost So where does that leave us?

Transformation is never linear it’s like a pendulum that goes back and forth

that means those things that were in vogue at one time

can experience a backlash so the question would be whether we can anticipate the backlash and whether we can be mentally prepared for when it comes and develop some sort of immunity to the knee-jerk reaction

that exists in all of us that’s really the question we know through time that norms

are not static the best example that i can think of is tied to smoking but we have a number of examples just looking at the last 50 years of where our opinions have changed due to the fact that those norms those

things that we consider to be normal that we don’t really think about but they come very apparent when they are outside the habits

of those individuals that are to be found within our group so if our group

does not believe in those norms anymore I’m following the chain of going from values to norms to habits and of course when we get to the habit phase that is clearly something that we do not think of cognitively there’s not a cognitive process but rather something that’s taking place in the subconscious so then the real question is how do we go ahead and use on a certain level the vehicle of shame against those individuals or institutions that we need to change for us to actually go ahead and prosper

as a society and so could you imagine if this was to be built constructed as a triangle /-\ and you had within that triangle /-\

you would have shame as being one of the

points that we we use this vehicle to change what we think is considered to be permissible and by changing those things

that we say are permissible that we inherently are changing the norms

of our group

and with that we say we within our tribe do not perform these actions anymore we do not agree to whatever it may be and that’s what we as a group what we stand for and if we’re talking about real change within our society then we have no choice we need to bring all of this to the frontal lobe and really think about

how do we go ahead and make this happen and at the same time in closing, I’d like to go ahead and raise another scenario

because we were talking about having a ride for free could it be the case that these so-called free riders that their actions are not necessarily tied to what we think they might be but there’s something underlying that we

we need to take a closer look at and that very possibly we might be

mixing up the symptoms from the root cause

and that the non-compliance can be very much tied to some norms that if we were able to look at them in a different situation a situation where perhaps all the emotions are removed

that we would come to the conclusion that that maybe we’re talking about a barrier to entry that maybe the subject is not free-riding after all

maybe exclusion is the subject that we should be looking at and maybe just

maybe we in some fashion had something to do

with certain individuals feeling excluded and maybe just maybe we were propelled into setting off that exclusionary behavior because in fact we might be manipulated so some takeaways from today let’s not forget that by nature we’re all free riders that the actions are very much tied to symptoms and not necessarily the root cause that we need to look at that role between being inclusive and exclusive and as always we all have a choice so I wish for all of you that path to empowerment and look forward to our next take today next week thanks for listening