The Magic Wand Experiment | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

so as a condition of our experiment i'm giving you the ability to access every bit of data you want from everyone in the experiment yes i would like that and i know that down sounds crazy but i'm going pie in the sky like you said yes no you get that request granted i'm the czar of the magic wand i've granted you that request [Music] experiments come in many forms there are natural experiments experiments based on observations from the real world thought experiments where we game out a problem and its potential solution in our heads and formal experiments the ones that scientists design and perform in the laboratory but there's another type of experiment my favorite kind of experiment the magic wand experiment where i call up the smartest people i know and ask them to think big to give me the experiment of their dreams because remember we are changing this environment because you're giving me all this money yeah i'm giving you unlimited money unlimited money elon musk money i'm letting you go nuts i'm letting you this is a magic wand the poet homer invented the magic wand in his greek epics the iliad and the odyssey the god hermes used a magic wand to make people sleep athena used it to make odysseus old and then young again cersei used a wand to turn the crew of odysseus into pigs then for a few thousand years not much magic wand action until now when all of us at revisionist history have decided to revive the magic wand for the greatest of all forbidden pleasures nerdy experiments my name is malcolm gladwell welcome back to revisionist history my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood kick off this season we've asked scientists what if you could design an experiment without considering any financial logistical ethical practical constraints the experiment that allows you to answer the question that could never otherwise be answered [Music] the experiment so far-fetched so fantastical so offensive that you don't usually even admit that you want to do it unless someone calls you up and says oh come on [Music] how many how many do you want in each in this experiment uh 100 males and 100 females dream dream big you can go more than a hundred okay sure we'll give you a thousand i'll give you that okay the idea for this season of revisions history was born in frustration i've always believed that those of us alive in the 21st century are all modern and smarty pants but over and again i get into a serious discussion with some brilliant person and after that person had dropped all of their expert bluster they would say oh but we don't really know the answer to that or i wish we knew but we don't it took me back because i suddenly remembered that's what my dad used to always say whenever i pestered him with a question big sigh hand to his forehead slight shake of the head and then no idea no idea which i thought was just graeme gladwell but now i realize is everyone the great sobering discovery of my middle age is that the list of things we don't know is a lot longer than the list of things we do know which suggested to me that we really need to get cracking hence this season of revision revisionist history a season devoted entirely to experiments starting with the special category of magic wands i got lots of suggestions about magic wand experiments on the physical world suggestions like that of my friend david epstein author of the wonderful book range why generalists triumph in a specialized world david wrote me the following email which i asked him to read out loud it might be really fun to talk to a string theorist i haven't kept up with this in years but i remember at one point hearing that if you wanted to directly test string theory you'd need a particle collider the size of the solar system and then i seem to recall that there was some writing about the feasibility of a collider wrapping around the entire solar system come to think of it if you had a particle collider that big maybe we could basically recreate the big bang maybe finally figure out why gravity's such a weird weak force and what dark matter is so yeah okay i vote for solar system size particle collider david i love you you know that don't take this personally we need to have a few ground rules like we're not doing physics experiments or for that matter anything on space travel crypto the bond market or the ramifications of supreme court decisions etc etc i am limiting this set of magic wands to the basics human things exercise diet and babies i'll let you guess why my show my wands second ground rule the reason to do magic wands is to help us think about the things we want to know but aren't allowed to find out magic wands are supposed to make you feel a little uncomfortable my guess is that you will feel uncomfortable at least once over the next 40 minutes and that's totally fine so here are my top five experiments that can never be done drum roll please we begin with the penis test this was the idea of harvard university child psychologist joyce beninson [Music] she's the author of a deeply fascinating book called warriors and worriers here's what she would do with her magic wand okay so um i'll say it and that is if we could randomly cut off a bunch of infant babies at birth boys penises and attach them to randomly selected girls and have them raised by their parents as the opposite sex from what they were biologically destined to be because the parents are misinformed and then look at their activities and interests we remove the penises of one group of boy babies babies born with xy chromosomes we attach those body parts to a group of newborn girls the double x chromosome babies so the parents of the boys assume they're raising girls and vice versa remember this is all with a magic wand no one's suffering are we socializing them with our controls with boys and penises and girls without okay well just to be as clean as possible i would keep them just with one another i would isolate them so there's no other influences that to me would be just the strongest one i think it would be a beautiful experiment [Music] what beninson wants to test is the impact of parenting on gender identity it's really hard to untangle nature and nurture people have been arguing about this for millennia so benson says let's just wave our magic wand put together a massive perfectly designed experiment and settle this issue once and for all if your mom and dad are confused about what gender you belong to does that make any difference to you beninson has been researching the behavior of children for more than four decades and she's pretty sure what the answer is she thinks that if you take boys and raise them as girls nothing's going to change remove the penises dress them in pink none of that will alter their behavior those would be the ones engaging in rough and tumble play those would be the ones who would be punching each other and competing to show they're the best they would be the ones who love transportation vehicles and weapons as for the girls bedinson says calling them johnny and giving them baseball caps isn't going to change anything the one with the penises right who are actually xx females they would be much more concerned about their survival they're taking care of either the dolls or the actual babies they're cleaning and making sure hygiene is better they're cooking either real or or pretend they're doing the kinds of things that anybody who goes into a preschool sees are not socialized by anyone but naturally occurring and you would see the division so that the in this case the ones with the penises would be crowding around the sink and crowding around the um the stove and the baby dolls and dressing up and the ones without the penises would be jumping on top of each other's heads and competing to throw the best arrow or paper airplane or whatever it is parenting does not override biology that's what beninson already believes so why do the magic wand if she already knows the answer because we don't just do experiments to learn the truth we also do experiments to persuade others of the truth in this case to persuade the legions of neurotic north american parents who believe that it is their own practice and attitudes that shape their children's fundamental nature okay so most people will say to me nowadays at least here in the west that parents are raising their daughters arbitrarily to be a certain way and parents are raising their sons and all we have to do is stop that and then there will be no basic instincts there will be no divide between males and females there will be nothing that we are motivated or emotionally attracted to naturally biologically now maybe you're one of those parents in the nurture over nature camp maybe you think that what joyce benson thinks is crazy and offensive maybe you're right maybe there are children out there who are shaped by their parents careful administrations like a lump of clay from a potter's wheel that's why we're doing an experiment wait so how long do you let this experiment run at what point do you unblind the parents okay so now we're talking about ethics right because if i were to waive ethical constraints but from your purposes it needs to run for how many years to get a a persuasive result well i mean obviously hormones come online and you'd have to do too much to me to run this through puberty but i would absolutely run it through age five just think if benison's right nature triumphs over nurture so you're lying on your shrinks couch and the shrink is making you think it's all your mother's fault which is what they do of course only now you get to say actually there was this cool experiment where they chopped off the penises of little boys and found out mom doesn't matter that much [Music] have i shocked your delicate sensibilities just wait we've got four more experiments to go after the break [Music] [Music] okay we're back on to our next impossible possibly unethical but super interesting and useful experiment the magic wand of new york university psychologist adam alter i had a lot of internal debate about whether to include this one because adam happens to be a very good friend of mine so i worried it would look like favoritism but then i thought back to the first six seasons of revisionist history and decided it's a little late in the day to be raising journalistic standards kidding okay so what i want to do is i want to go to every hospital in the country every maternity ward and when every baby is born some person randomly walks around and puts a little sticker on the baby's forehead and the sticker determines which condition the child will be in for the first let's say 50 years of life okay yeah no you haven't mentioned it let's be modest about it you have a magic wand you're allowed to fifty okay five zero fifties it's a it's a fifty year experiment yeah and uh what we're going to do is based on the color of the sticker we're gonna assign kids to different conditions of exposure to screens and social media and we're going to track their progress across the lifespan across those 50 years or even longer alter wants to do this because he points out that we basically have no idea what the long-term effects of screen time and social media are hence the alter screen test there are two camps right now there's a camp that thinks that social media screens all the concerns about those are a moral panic there's nothing to be concerned about and then there's another account that thinks this is the is really a serious concern what are all the things we're looking for the thing that i want to know number one is is it bad for your well-being are you less happy do you have a less meaningful life are you less connected to other people if you have access to screens throughout your life and how much is a problem is one hour a day okay is three hours okay is five i'm sure there's a point at which it becomes problematic there's some evidence that your ability to distinguish subtle facial cues that show say the difference between fear and sadness comes from spending a lot of time as a kid as a very young kid looking at people face to face so i would like to know do kids who spend a huge amount of time in front of screens never develop those capacities is there a critical period where if you don't develop them young it becomes very hard to develop them later on and i think there's some evidence to suggest that the the ability to tell for example to get a sense of the effects of your actions on other people seems really important so as a little kid you take another kid's toy that kid bops you on the head and says don't do that that's really important to learn and i think to the extent you're spending a huge amount of time on screens the feedback you get when you do social things is low fidelity it's slow to arrive it's not physical and so i think these kids are going to learn social things less quickly and i think that might be problematic as well so that's that's the early part of life as we get older i mean you just have to talk to parents of teens and even to the teens themselves and they'll tell you i am less happy because i have access to social media a lot of teens will tell you this and their parents will say the same um and so i'd like a sort of harder edged way to measure that what does that exactly mean and is it because you're exposed to the best one percent of everyone else's life that you become less happy or is there something else going on so those are those are the kinds of questions that i'd want to know about teens in particular what's interesting about adam alter's magic wand is that it runs counter to the penis test the penis test has the potential to absolve parents of all blame alters experiment has the potential to make you feel really really bad about a decision you made for your children there's no middle ground with magic wands there was only euphoria on the one hand and a mountain of guilt on the other this reminds me oddly enough of my own childhood because i was the only child in my primary school without was that the only one one of the only ones without television right so i was i was the child who was listening to these conversations about things that i'd never heard of these television shows which meant nothing to me who the pattern of my days was completely different from everybody else's so i sort of get how that works and just see how i turned out needlessly provocative irrationally obsessed with running a delightful podcast host you see what i'm saying was it because i didn't watch television until i went to college we just don't know you know what we need to give them are old school blackberries yeah so it's a phone it's email and that's it right yeah so we're basically talking about creating a blackberry generation alongside an iphone generation and we're controlling we're we're controlling for the nature of their phone and observing the outcome yes no one is happier by the way with an experiment that brings back the blackberry blackberry as i'm constantly reminding people was made in my hometown my tagline on my old blackberry emails was there's no school like old school [Music] oh man i miss the simple pleasures driving down the highway rocking out to the latest nirvana album on my cd player while scrolling through my emails on my blackberry with my free hand my son started kindergarten he's five and for the first time he got an ipad to take home all of his little friends have got these screens and so they talk about the things they do on the screens at the end of the day and i think that's that's a completely different thing how it's changed the way he's interacting with all these little kids versus what it's like to get him off the screen at the end of the day i think both are interesting questions yeah yeah um wait i can't believe that in the middle of you imagining this magic wand experiment involving limited access to screens and social media your own son is being given an idea yeah well we had no say this is what schools do today they give kids ipads unfortunately okay we have the penis test we have the alter screen test next up nancy siegel who teaches a cal state fullerton and studies what she calls scientific treasures twins twins are catnip for psychologists and no one loves a twin more than nancy siegel who is also herself a twin now you might say aren't identical twins in effect nature's magic wand a little bit of genetic wizardry that lets us see things we would never know about otherwise absolutely in fact and this will require a little digression siegel once uncovered a totally bananas real-life twins case study two sets of twins born a day apart in colombia one pair born in the lively capital city of bogota the other born 110 miles to the north in the most rural area with no running water no flush toilets no nothing one of the little boys up north was very sick so at day one or two his grandmother brought him to the better hospital in bogota where he was switched with one of the twins in the other pair so this is an extraordinary double switch case so you had two sets of boys who were identical twins to somebody else but growing up together thinking they were fraternal twins so you can look at the unrelated pair this is somebody that that person a was raised with so twin b was unrelated to him but then remember twin b has an identical brother somewhere else that person a was never raised with so how similar are you to somebody you're unrelated to but raised with but unrelated to and not raised with so that was that was something i addressed in my book because i had that and that was completely unique completely unique the bogota twins how did they discover the error oh good question the boys up in the north moved down to bogota to make a living they became butchers in a local supermarket actually bogota is a big city it wasn't so local but a friend of one of the other guys who was raised there went into the butcher shop and she thought jorge what are you doing here and he said my name is william and she could hardly believe it so she took a picture of william showed it to her friend jorge and jorge of course is a twin right he thinks he's a twin to the sky carlos and anyway they sat on it for a while but then jorge went online and he saw himself in clothes he knew he didn't own and he saw someone next to this guy who looked just like his twin brother only wasn't his twin brother and they met they got together and of course they were all in shock particularly because the one guy who was raised in the city knew that if things had gone right he would've been raised in a very rural area and he's someone who enjoyed the city and the guy up in the north who should have been raised in bogota was desperate for education wanted to learn and had no opportunities never went past the fifth grade so there were some tensions in the beginning but actually i will say that these four boys are the most gracious and loving of any of the switch to birth families i've encountered they call themselves a group of four they make decisions together and any differences they had i mean it was not their fault these things just happen sometimes they get along beautifully now all for all combinations of twins it's quite an incredible story [Music] now could you imagine a magic wand replication of that real life experiment sure but siegel has a better idea a bigger idea this is a new buzzword in the twin world biracial twins what are they they come about naturally when an interracial couple marries and has children so let's say you have a caucasian mother and an african-american father so the children are really both biracial but given the way that the genes segregate one child looks very caucasian and one child looks very african-american now these are fraternal twins so you're not controlling for the jeans what i would like to do if i could would be to have a set of identical twins and have them look exactly the same except that one would look caucasian and one would look african-american a woman would look asian and one would look hispanic but still raise them together and just see what their different life experiences are like and how that would impact in their development and i got this idea because i've had fraternal twins in my classes at the university who are these biracial fraternal twins and they've told me they have very different life experiences but again you're not controlling for the genes so if you had monozygotic or identical twins like this i think it would really show us in a new way and this isn't this is what information we don't have so the well the the magic wand we have to wave here is to take identical twins and make them not identical in their skin color exactly we have the twins dressed the same eat the same go to the same schools same summer camps play on the same soccer teams and do that for hundreds of pairs of twins from thousands of different families rich poor the southern united states the midwest country city and after 30 or 40 years we gather them together in a big convention center and have them go up on stage one pair at a time and talk about all the experiences they shared as almost identical twins what was the same what exactly was different who wouldn't want to be in the audience for that because suddenly we would have a very different conversation about things like discrimination i have to say though that of all these magic ones so far this one is the hardest the cruelest yes it would teach us a lot but i couldn't help thinking of my own mother who was an identical twin she and her sister went to college in england from jamaica in the 1950s what if my aunt had been white what would it have meant for their relationship if suddenly the person who my mother had shared everything with for the first 20 years of her life was suddenly on the other side of the racial fence at a time in a place when the racial offenses were really high it's too much to think about but that's why a magic wand is sometimes a powerful thing [Music] siegel had so many ideas she described a magical wand where identical twins could be born 25 years apart same genes different generations think of all the things you could do once you suspend this little law of nature we could go back to adam alter's screen test because the perfect way to do his blackberry versus iphone experiment now that i think about it is with massive numbers of identical twins same genes different cell phones now imagine we placed those twins in different technological eras the first set born in 1980 who grew up without instagram or twitter and another identical set born the year the iphone came out 2007 and you grew up under the long dark shadow of steve jobs what do we learn from that we learn everything i just realized i gave you two or was it three magic one twin studies for the price of one that's how we roll here at revisions history [Music] we've done the penis test iphone versus blackberry multiracial twin studies and now the magic wand has been passed stella volpe a nutritionist and exercise physiologist at virginia tech university how did you get to me because can i just tell you i see this email from malcolm gladwell in my inbox and i was at a conference and i said to my friend okay this is real i i think this is the real malcolm gladwell yes this is the real malcolm gladwell and stella volpe's experiment was my very favorite her premise is this americans are getting less and less healthy we need to try new strategies to change that so for her magic wand she divides the united states in half one half is the control group which continues life as ever eating doritos and watching netflix over the other half of the country those in the treatment condition volpe waves her magic wand and gets to work making all kinds of subtle and not so subtle changes right now so much of our focus when it comes to getting people to improve their health behaviors is to tell them what to do and instruct them and cajole them and such but you're talking about a series of interventions in their built environment should we just do it and not say anything yes i did that actually in a dining hall at a university oh really we changed we changed the portion sizes we decreased the portion sizes the students didn't know turns out it worked the students in stella volpe's stealth small portion cafeteria didn't gain the freshman 15. the students in the control group did and you didn't tell them that you were decreasing the the portion size we didn't now did the students any of them suspect what was going on you know they didn't because that and i really give credit to the food service employees students didn't quite know that the pizza was cut a little bit smaller or that the cake was cut in like instead of 84 slices there were 96 so this is what we had to work with the food service folks to do and they were amazing so volpe's magic wand experiment is also a stealth operation if you're in the experimental half of the country you wake up one morning and you find a lot of the elevators are gone what's your elevator threshold so i can if i live in manhattan in a 20 store building you're not going to make me walk up but what's what's the point at which i get to use an elevator if i'm otherwise unencumbered right three stories four i would i i'm going to say six stories she wants to swap out heart chairs in offices for bouncy balls give kids standing desks in the classroom put a quarter mile between a parking lot and the building it serves give grocery stores a makeover yeah wait um stella i just had a good idea it this is going to my idea is going to uh is going to link two of your things okay your your grocery store and your stairs idea what about this in the in the treatment condition grocery stores can still carry whatever they want to carry but everything that stella deems to be unhealthy is now on the on a third floor of the grocery store if you want a chocolate bar if you want cheerios you're gonna walk up two flights to get them okay that is so brilliant thank you i love that so we can do that right we can do that oh yeah we can wave our magic wand now think about how much we could learn from stella volpe's idea maybe the people without the elevators and with the parking lots down the street rise up in protest maybe they would all move to the other half of the country in a huff that would tell us something tell us to give up but maybe they'd just shrug and get used to it or maybe stella volpe's treatment half of the country gets so fit and happy and tough-minded that the slacker half gets envious and competitive and starts making the same changes in their world or maybe nobody wants to hire the slacker half and all of a sudden there's a wave of workforce discrimination suits against the slacker half for being slackers and the supreme court has to weigh in in slacker v volpe the point is right now we're getting nowhere insisting on trying to educate and persuade and create awareness maybe it's time for us to admit that all this talking does nothing we just need to do stuff i realize my school in canada did a version of this it's a slightly cruel version of this but this is canada in the 70s so the bus would drop me off at my school and all the other kids uh from my bus route at 8 35 in the morning okay school starts at nine in my little town from 8 35 to 9 the doors to the school were locked so you had 25 minutes of enforced play time now i will point out to you it's canada i was just going to like it's to this day i remember you know i'm skinny i'm a little skinny like the only way to stay warm is to run around like a madman for 25 minutes it was like it's basically put a gun to our head and said you you know if you want to you can you can just stand there but you'll you'll get frostbite [Laughter] see this belongs in the in the treatment condition do you know how long winter lasts in ontario like four months for four months i froze to death every single morning and look and look look at the character it built in you right good character absolutely am i complaining now the penis swap iphone versus blackberry biracial twins slacker v volpe how is the world not a better place if we could learn from those four experiments [Music] but wait i know what you're thinking malcolm you promised us five magic wands where's the fifth the fifth my friends is so massive and wonky and random that i felt it deserved an episode all to itself we did have to really put on a lot of gear to get it in there for food safety reasons i think that's in our next episode our experiment of a season is just getting started you're wearing like hard hats gloves hard hats jackets oh uh caps for our hair that didn't really work for either of us [Music] revisionist history is produced by eloise linton lehmann gesture and jacob smith with charlie emlin and harrison vijay choi our editor is julia barton our executive producer is mia labelle original scoring by luis guerra mastering by flan williams and engineering by nina lawrence fact checking by kisha williams i'm mark [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Malcolm Gladwell

Views: 17,258

Keywords: Revisionist History Podcast, Malcolm Gladwell, Malcolm Gladwell Podcast, Revisionist History Season 7, Magic Wand Experiments, Stella Volpe, Joyce Bennenson, Adam Alter, David Epstein, Nancy Segal

Id: HxXPjz40Kcw

Length: 34min 18sec (2058 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2022