>> Christian Bird: Adam Alter is an assistant professor at psychology New York
University Stern School of Business and Psychology. His work has been widely published in academia and has been featured in the mainstream media on PBS, BBC and in the New York Times Wall Street Journal and the Economist. He has a
Ph.D. from Princeton. Please join me in welcoming him.
[applause]
>> Yuriy Brun: Thanks, Amy. Thanks to all of you for having me. It's terrific to be here. I'm very excited about speaking to you all. And I just want to start by giving you a sense of my background very briefly just to give you a sense of where I've come from and why I wrote this book.
I studied law and psychology as an undergrad in Australia, and then I moved to the U.S. to do a Ph.D. in psychology in social and cognitive psychology, and I very quickly became really interested partly because I was interested in the law in how we make decisions, how does someone decide whether to commit a wrongful act. And often the answers are not that interesting. But sometimes they are interesting, and they're interesting because people don't have great access to the origins of those decisions.
So I started to study human judgment decision-making and in particular I was interested in all the forces that act on us without our recognizing that they're having those effects. That's really what Drunk Tank Pink is all about:
The subtitle: Unexpected forces that shape how we think, feel and behave that sums up my interest in humans, how they make the decisions they do and why they think the things they do.
And I'm going to share a few anecdotes, little chunks from within the book with you today, and then at the end I'd love to take some questions because I think that's often where the most interesting stuff happens.
So before I do that, just to give can you a sense of how I think of the mind.
There are so many metaphors for the mind. People talk about the mind as a telephone exchange or as a computer.
The one that I like the best for the purposes of today's talk is that the mind is basically an iceberg. And you have access to the stuff above the surface of conscious awareness and it turns out there's a lot less there than you might

think. So above it, it looks like everything is there contained there but of course like an iceberg much of what's interesting is actually below the surface of conscious awareness.
The job of Drunk Tank Pink or of my job in creating Drunk Tank Pink is to try to populate a bit of the iceberg below, to try and understand why this part happens to be this shape, this part happens to be this shape, and I'm going to argue with the book that a lot of what shapes the iceberg as it is, is this stuff around us and its impact on how we think, feel and behave.
So just to start, I want to give you a sense of why I call the book Drunk Tank
Pink. Drunk Tank Pink is a color, and it's an emblem for a lot of the effects that I talk about in the book.
It's this bright pink -- I don't know how that came out right, but it's a bright pink bubble gummy Pepto Bismol color. If you could see the screen as I see it here, it looks like the worst antibiotic you had to take as a kid, that bright pinkish sickening color. The color came to prominence in '60s at first.
Psychologists some have been reading the book. That means you probably started with the prologue which means you read a little bit about this but psychologists in the '60s, in parts of Canada were very interested in trying to determine whether if you changed the colors of the walls in a room, you could change the behavior of the students. Could you lead them to believe better.
And that's where the original use of the color came in. What they did was they went into a series of classrooms and they painted those classrooms a series of different colors.
And then they measured whether that had any effect on the behavior of the students. It was reasonably scientific. But it wasn't as rigorous as we'd like it to be, as scientists like these things to be usually. And they had theories about all these different colors. That blue might be associated with the tranquility of the sea or the sky. Green would remind them of nature and the organic nature of trees and greenery. And so that might make them a little more creative, a little bit more relaxed. Yellow should make them feel more engaged, vibrant, interested.
And pink, they weren't really sure what to make of pink, but they tried it anyway. And it turns out that's the color that stuck the best, the best responses came from this color pink because the rowdy students in the classroom

who were more disruptive turned out to be a lot less so in the presence of this color pink.
That's pretty striking, but obviously we don't have enough evidence just from that one study to make strong claims about this color. So they started to do some more rigorous studies to see whether they could show that this color pink had systematic effects on human behavior.
So one of the first studies was run on 153 men, healthy men, and what they were asked to do was to stare at a piece of pink cardboard, just a pretty small piece of pink cardboard, and to stare at that cardboard for a minute. After that they were asked to grip what's called a hand grip dynamometer, which basically measures your grip strength. And it shows on a digital scale how hard you're gripping with your hand. They had the men look at the pink cardboard for a minute it and grip the dynamometer as hard as possible and repeat that with blue cardboard.
Some people did it in that order, some looked at the blue cardboard first.
Obviously you need to counterbalance these things because you'll get weaker over time. But the results were pretty striking. What they found was among those 153 people, every single one of them, except for two, were stronger after looking at the blue card than at the pink cardboard, which is striking effect.
In social science research, in this sort of human performance research, that's a huge, huge effect. It's unusual to find such a strong effect.
And so they started to talk about this a little more widely. They shared it with the media. It started to take off in popular culture in all sorts of different settings. The reasons it has its other name, Drunk Tank Pink is officially known as Baker Miller Pink. The names Baker Miller are the names of two Naval officers who worked at a correctional facility that happens to be quite near here. It was in Seattle.
And what they did was they saw a talk about this color, and they decided that they, too, would paint the inside of jail cells, a couple of their drunk tanks, this color. And the idea was that they would pacify the prisoners who came in the most rowdy and dangerous prisoners, they'd throw them in there for 15 minutes and they'd come out 15 minutes later, pacified, less aggressive, tranquilized, better behaved.

And across a nine-month period they reported even though they had regular incidents, when they put the prisoners in the cell for 15 minutes, they didn't have a single incident afterwards. Which is another striking effect.
Then football coaches got wind of this. At the University of Iowa, they decided that they would paint the visitors' locker room this color to try to pacify their opponents. So this idea was that before the game started, their opponents would walk into this visitor locker room, the visitors locker room, they would see this bright pink color and they would be weakened by that, since it weakened prisoners and weakened guys who were holding hand grips, it would weaken the football players as well. At halftime when normally they would get jazzed for the second half they actually emerged weaker.
The University of Iowa still looks like this, the visitor locker room is still this pink color.
So Drunk Tank Pink gained a lot of currency, and there's some questions about the effect today. People question why the effect emerged. Is it something biological? Do we respond to that particular color? Is it something about the association we have with the color pink? There's quite a lot of research suggesting all sorts of alternatives. And I talk a little bit about that in the opening of the book.
I think it's a nice emblem for the effects I talk about in the book because it arose from nowhere. People couldn't believe that something as innocuous as a color could have such powerful effects. And yet it seems to have those effects. At least there's some evidence for those effects.
It's also quite complex. There are multiple reasons why it might be happening.
It might partly be biological. I talk a lot of biological effects in the book.
Or it's possible it's about the association we have between the color pink and various things perhaps weakness or feminity, and so there are a whole lot of different alternative explanations for that, and I think those come up time and again in the book.
What I'm going to do today is tell you a little bit about each of the sections of the book. So I talk about these cues in three sections. The first is the world within us. This is the stuff that resides in our heads where we don't

need to interact with other people. It's enough just for us to have processed the information in isolation.
Things like the names we call things. The language we use to describe things, the symbols we see around us, logos, icons.
Then I'm going to talk about the world between us. So this is a little bit broader. The world first resides in your head and then it resides between us.
What does it matter that there are a certain number of people in this room and a certain number of people watching online.
Does that make a difference? If I were delivering this talk to an empty room, would that matter? If this room were filled with 20,000 people, if it were more than just a room, if it were a stadium, would that matter?
Obviously the answer there is yes, and I explore those questions in the second part of the book, and I'll talk a little bit about that. And then in the final part I talk about the physical world. And that's where color comes in, the weather, locations. And the world around us, the world that surrounds all of us, not just between us and not just within us, but also around us.
So starting with the world inside us, or the world within us, I want to talk a little bit about names. And the names we give people and places and things, objects.
In the 1980s, a Belgian social psychologist ran a study where he asked people who spoke a whole lot of different languages, some of them spoke English, some
German, some Russian, some Greek, using all sorts of different languages, different alphabets, he asked them: Please circle your six favorite letters of the alphabet, which is a weird question. People don't often ask you what your favorite letter is, strange question to ask, but probably do, if pushed, have favorites.
And if you're like many, many people, one of your favorites, assuming you have a reasonable degree of self-esteem and don't hate your name, one of your favorites will be your initial. Your first initial and maybe your last. In my case A is both my first and last initial so I really like A.
And this is sort of an idly interesting effect, it reflects self-esteem in a way you might not expect to see it in the world at large but it also has major

implications for policy. And this is something that I talk about in the book that hadn't really been discussed much before, but when you stumble on these effects, these systematic biases we have you can then capitalize on them in I think quite interesting ways.
So we know that people name each other and we name children. We also name some other things in the world. One of the things we happen to name is hurricanes.
We identify and have done since the mid 1950s hurricanes by a certain name.
So on the left here we have Hurricane Katrina. And on the right we have
Hurricane Rita. These were two of the very severe hurricanes during the 2005 record-breaking hurricane season. Terrible hurricanes that did immense damage.
You probably recognize Katrina, maybe not so much Rita. But it turns out these were two of the very, very damaging hurricanes from that season.
One question is: Does it matter that they were named Katrina and Rita? Should it matter? What if we gave them slightly different names? Would that matter?
Would there be any material outcome there or change in any material outcome if we did. It turns out, yes, it is important what we name these hurricanes.
When you ask the weather service why they name certain hurricanes with certain names, they say what happened in the '50s was we found it was difficult to keep naming hurricanes after the location where they struck because we didn't know where they were going to strike until after they arrived. And so we used latitude and longitude. But of course people don't know what to make of latitude and longitude. Most people don't have any sense of what that means.
So they began using these arbitrary names, selected and placed on a list alphabetically.
So imagine that Katrina and Rita come by. They do a lot of damage and you want to assemble a team of celebrities. And you decide that you want these two teams of celebrities, team one will deal with one of the hurricanes and try to raise money. You'll perhaps ask them to donate, and team two will deal with the other hurricane. Let's say this is your first team is Team Green. Here are your celebrities. This is Team Blue.
The question is would it matter which group of celebrities you assigned to each hurricane? And if so, why should it matter? Does anyone notice anything that distinguishes the green team from the blue team?
>>: First letter --

>> Yuriy Brun: Yeah, first letter of the name. In fact for these two you have
Kevin Cline and Ryan Reynolds. Like Adam Alta, they specially identify with these initials. If you look again, you can see these people have names that start with R and these with K.
And so they align with those hurricanes in an interesting way. You've got team
K for Katrina and team R for Rita. And researchers have shown when a hurricane shares your initial and aid agencies seek disaster relief aid people will donate much more to hurricanes that happen to share their initials. People are two and a half times more likely to donate to Katrina, well, they were if they had K initials and to Rita if they had R initials. And in fact that's true across a whole raft of major hurricanes over the last 12 years or so, which the experimenters showed.
So what can we do with this? This is an extension of the basic effect showing that names matter. Well, there are a few things we can do with it. One is to look at the way that American names work and how different letters are more or less likely to appear as initials in the American taxonomy of names. And what you find if you look at the census is that it does matter.
I'm going to represent the relative frequency of names beginning of these by size. This is obviously assuming that each letter is equally represented.
Here's what it actually looks like when you look at the distribution. Js are very common. In fact, 10 percent of all males have names that begin with J. M is common particularly in women. And you can see A, C, D, R, S, T, is common, and others are less common. If you zoom in on something like a letter O, there are names that begin with O. And in fact these are names hurricanes will have, but they're much less common, O names. The question is: What should we do with this, given that we have all this information, when put all this together, how do we attract as much hurricane aid as we possibly can by renaming hurricanes; is this something we can do?
And the same is true of the names that we're currently using. Here are the 21 names for the 2013 hurricane season. As each storm becomes a tropical storm and hurricane, it will attract the first name, second, and third and so on.
Will do it for six years in a row and then return to this list.
The question is: Are these well-chosen names, based of what we know of human psychology, are they well chosen, some are head shaking and say there is no

they aren't ideally chosen. The best way to represent this is the same way as
I represented before. Will take these names and again show the relatively frequency of these names. If people are attracted to their initials and they identify with their initials, they will probably do the same with their names.
You can see here which names are more or less common. Melissa, Jerry and Karen are very common. Some of these names -- this name you can't see here is
Sebastian, spelled with an E. Van is a much less common name. So based on what we say if Hurricane Van happened to do the damage that Hurricane Katrina did, we'd really be missing out on a great opportunity. Perhaps it should have been named something that attracted more attention and tapped into a greater segment of the human population, basic argument. In fact, you could name these hurricanes better, keeping the gender the same, I've now rescaled that; and now using that same scale, if we'd named the hurricanes with these names, this is how much of the population we would have tapped into. So compared to these sizes here, James, Mary, David, Elizabeth, these are names that attract a greater proportion of the population, or match a greater proportion of the population.
And when you crunch all the numbers across time, you look at 27 most damaging hurricanes over the last 13 years, this is what you find, that we've we attracted about $10 billion in aid. That effect I just talked about, the named letter effect for donating to hurricanes, accounts for about half a billion in aid, of that 10 billion, 500 million comes because we identify with their names. If that effect weren't part of the human psychology, we would have only attracted nine and a half billion. It's only 5 percent less, but 500 million is a lot of money. If we perfectly named them, as they should have been named according to this approach, and there are other considerations, I'm not saying this is how we should structure the policy, but certainly this is something to at least think about. If we optimized the situation we would have attracted an extra $700 million in aid, which is striking. This is an inexpensive intervention. It costs nothing. To rename hurricane, the weather service just has to pass I guess some sort of internal motion. They'll name the hurricanes differently and all of a sudden aids should increase. Over a 12 year period,
13 year period only, looking at 27 of the most damaging storms, that amounts to
$700 million for free.
So this is one illustration of how an effect, tweaking an effect can change how the world works and how our thinking is shaped by a factor that you would never imagine you would be willing to give to a hurricane.

The need of people during a hurricane doesn't change because you happen to share the initial of that hurricane's name, yet you get these profound effects.
At an individual level this is great for policymakers, but what does this mean for you as an individual, how should you deal with this? There are a few things you should look for in a name. One of those things, this is where a lot of my research focuses, is fluency. You should try and make the name as fluent as possible or easy to pronounce as possible. The test to use to determine this is imagine that you're at the Oscars and you have to read this person's name out, how easy is it to read their name as you open the envelope. You've seen it when someone opens an envelope at the Oscars and they struggle.
Thinking of the test 191 variants of Kathryn, turns out it's the name with the most variants and here are some of them. So you can have fluent versions of
Kathryn and disfluent version of Kathryn. Excellent version is Katrina, shares a name of a hurricane. Slightly less excellent version is this one. It's still pronounced roughly the same I think. And then this not so good version, it's a variant of the same name, but the argument is that you should choose the more fluent one, and the reasons are, the reasons are many but here's one reason. If you look at lawyers, this is some research I did with some colleagues in Australia, you look at how long it took them to reach partnership. Turns out their name matters a lot. The fluency of the name really matters. If we have people doing the Oscar test looking at names with lots of lawyers, imagine you're opening the envelope, you're about to present this person's name, how easy or difficult is that?
And we say these are the people with the disfluent names, these are the people with the fluent names, and we look at how long it takes them to make partner when they leave grad school, law school.
What you find is after three years we don't have any whiz kids here, none are yet partners in the firm. After eight years, a gap has opened up, affluently named lawyers are more likely to be partners. In the middle part of their career there seems to be a slight advantage for the fluently named lawyers, and that persists into the light part of their career, not light, but more middle part of their career. So this gap has widened up, there's a 9 percent difference. And as that gap actually closes at the 16th year, and what this tells us is people who have fluent names will rise up more quickly but it's not because they're better lawyers. Eventually the same proportion will become

partners but it takes them less time to get there. And there are all sorts of potential reasons for this.
When people walk in the door on the first day and they're met by a partner and the partner is trying to decide to work with and fluently named attorney will be chosen all else being equal. The second alternative is we feel a little bit better. We feel a little more comfortable with fluent names and there's a lot of research that suggests that as well. We feel when we meet someone a little bit more comfortable when we can pronounce their name easily.
So fluency is one thing to aim for. The same is true for financial stocks. We looked at the performance of stocks when they entered the markets following their IPO. What you find is in a week after the IPO, this is a very easy to pronounce name. This is a very hard to pronounce name, and this is the performance of the stock. This is obviously appreciation. And this is depreciation. This is just after one day. This is what you can expect based on how easy it is to pronounce your name. If the stock has an easy name, it will be much better, get a great pop. And if it has a difficult pronounced name, all things being equal, controlling for the same things, the same thing is true for those things, controlling for foreignness, unusualness, how common the letters are, all that sort of stuff, and the same for the stocks, controlling for industry type, when you control for all that stuff, fluency is still a very powerful factor.
>>: Has there been any research to show whether there's a similar effect with product names and company names based upon the number of symbols it has in the name? I definitely see two symbol names rather than three, the problem you're at Microsoft.
>> Yuriy Brun: I don't know of any research looking at syllables. But I could imagine there being effects. And there will also be exceptions like Microsoft.
But, yeah, I imagine there would be a similar effect. And I think it's strongly correlated with fluency. So a name with many syllables is probably harder to pronounce as well, in general.
I'll push ahead there. But I'm happy to take questions at any time. Raise your hand I'm happy to do that.

>>: Question online. Sort of answered it. He states base define fluency, because you talked about geographic demonstration.
>> Yuriy Brun: Good question. Fluency is the subjective sense, subjective use or difficulty associated with processing information. What that means is a name that you've never encountered before will be more disfluent in a name the same year. So the name Barack Obama is now fluent to everyone. It's been pronounced so many times that you see it on a page and if you had to be drawn out of a hat for some award, it would be easy to pronounce. No trouble with that. But it is subjective. It is -- a Polish names with a lot of constants in a row would be very disfluent to an American but less so to a Pol and so on.
So it's bound by culture, by language. Yes.
>>: My name is Chrispen, and I can tell you from experience the performance curve of that name when you're trying to be a school child is way different than when you're trying to build a publication record as a professor.
>>: Right. You're saying it's better as a professor than a --
>>: Yes, that's an excellent point.
>>: In research, it's great.
>> Yuriy Brun: Yes.
>>: Everyone knows who you are.
>> Yuriy Brun: The uniqueness factor is a different factor and it is also relevant. This controls for as many things as possible including uniqueness.
So we feed that into a model and Chrispen would do well on uniqueness and fluency as well, it's not too bad.
>>: No one can spell it.
>> Yuriy Brun: No one can spell it. Problem as well. It's tied to fluency.
And I think you're right. We've shown people like and think of writers as more intelligent when they can read what they've written more easily. So when a book is easy to read that's great, except when you think a person is a lawyer.
[laughter].

So context matters a lot. So for a schoolkid, you want to be as clear as possible and yes when you graduate, and then you enter the world, uniqueness then becomes valuable where it was a real cost, and it made things harder for you whether you were younger, I believe that, certainly.
>>: So this chart is really fascinating. There's such a direct correlation that it seems like it's almost purely driven like the stock performance is truly driven by how it is to pronounce a name like this. Literally people on
Wall Street are deciding whether or not to invest in these companies based on how easy it is to pronounce the name and 0 other factors, just looking at the data. That's scarier than anything else you've talked about. Isn't this just one day after perpetrator.
>>: We can control all of that stuff as far as far as possible. But what the model spits out the effect is a powerful effect. When you take everything else out, it still seems to be a powerful effect. And this is what you can expect based upon the fluency of the name. So yes, it is extremely worrying and I think that's what's so partly interesting about it.
I want to push ahead, hold on your to your question if you've got more about this section because I want to touch about other stuff now. I'm happy you're engaged, happy to come back to it later. On. Example of real stocks, capital
America did very nicely. The Hungarian telecommunications company named this did not do as well and went bust quite quickly. Examples, illustrative example but extreme examples there's a foreignness effect here and we control for the home by as that people exist, in people don't like to invest in what's foreign but we control at that by controlling the stocks but I don't think it's a little bit weaker. Second thing to look for in the names is the symbolism of name. And Microsoft actually has, you may not know this, but some very good features, strong features. I'll tell you what they those are. Turns out names generate on geometric maps, some way. If I told you some ways was an maluma, which one would it be, hands up if you think it's the one on the left. All right. Almost everyone in the world will tell you this is a maluma and this is a tacheti. Weirdly. There's no inherent reason for it, but a powerful effect.
And illusion that there's some correspondences is very powerful as well. Same for bubo is on the left, Kiki is on the right. And it matters for all sorts of reason: Stands for masculinity and femininity. If you had to name one of these children Tacheti and one Maluma, it would be pretty clear which one is which. And the Porsche hypothesis makes use of this the Porsche was a character Merchant to Venice, Shakespeare's merchant to Venice, wanted to

appear before the court but because she was a woman she wasn't allowed to and she had to dress up as a man. And it turns out that that reflects a real property in the world of law.
In South Carolina some researchers looked at how judges rose to the bench to judgeship. What they found was women who happened to have names that were shared more by men than names shared by women. For example, the name Jennifer is almost exclusively a woman's name. The name Leslie is a name that some men have that name and some women have that name.
If you have the name Leslie and you're a woman, you're more likely to become a judge and more quickly. That's the Porsche hypothesis. So controlling for all sorts of other matters, the name really matters. The symbolism, the masculinity of that name seems to overcome some of the gender bias in the legal system.
>>: Is that culture, the same sounds map to the same shape.
>> Yuriy Brun: Yes, it's incredibly robust. And that matters for companies.
Kelloggs with a hard K sound, and Coca Cola and Microsoft. And Cat and Costco.
There's pretty good evidence that companies with these hard K sounds in them tend to do disproportionately well.
If you look at the top 200 companies, a study done some time ago, but results still persist. Big number of the top 200 companies that start with K or have the hard K sound in them, the ones that have the hard K sound in them, that is a greater -- that's an overrepresentation of that sound relative to the population of names and words at large, which only have about seven percent of them or four percent of words that have the hard K sound. This is the reason why Eastman named Kodak Kodak, because he said the sound was so strong. You want to bring the name with a strong K, and end it with a strong K. So Kodak was the most dominant name he could come up with.
And that seems to at least reflect some property in these companies. Perhaps they just had smarter people naming them and they ended up doing better. I am not saying it's causal, but there's an interesting relationship there. That's the all I want to say about the world within us.
I want to briefly talk about the world between us. I don't want spend as much time on this, but I'll tell you of one really quite interesting effect.

And this is an effect in the domain of chess. This is Bratislov Krushchev, chess grandmaster. In 2009, his world rank was 58, serious chess player. And he's actually the world champion or was for a number of years at blitz chess, a game you play much more quickly. Different versions. You can either play five-minute chess or one-minute chess, but the moves are made very, very quickly.
He's something of a playboy in the world of chess as well. Known to show up to certain matches drunk and fall asleep halfway through the game. This has happened on a number of occasions. What he's known for is introducing the world chess beauty contest. He basically decided it wasn't fair that we only thought of chess players as all mental braun and no beauty. He decided that he would invite all the female chess grandmasters to enter the so-called world chess beauty contest. And that's what he did. And there is plenty of beauty in the world of chess. It may not be the place you'd think of first when think of a repository for beauty.
But this is Carmen Cass, she's the greatest player that Astonia has had for a long time. She was chairwoman of the Astonian Chess Foundation. This is
Carmen playing chess. The question is does it matter if you're facing Carmen rather than anyone else? Just a run of the mill person. How would you play chess differently. What if you were playing against a computer or Gary
Kasperov, one of the greatest players of all time. Does it matter who is sitting across from you? And Karchof, the guy that I showed you before, described playing against Kasperov as though he was playing against someone who was ten foot tall. All he could think of when he made every move was how big and overwhelming this guy was.
The question is what would it matter if you're playing against an attractive female opponent. Researchers asked that question and what they thought are, chess players are hyperrational, they're as rational as people come. If they're good at what they do they should do a very good job of processing all the information properly. They should have a strategy they should stick to.
So you shouldn't see too much deviation. If ever you're not going to see deviation based on biases, it should be in this world where the very best chess players are playing important games.
What they did is they looked at games across time. These are photos taken from a website called Hot or Not. I don't know if you know this site. Based upon

that response, you do. If you take all of the lowly ranked faces and average them, you get this face. If you take a whole lot of the very high ranked faces and average them highly rank faces, you get this face. That's some research.
The question is would it matter playing against this stylized person on the left or the stylized person on the right. And it turns out it really does matter. In games between '97 and 2007, heterosexual men who were playing against women, this is what they found: When they were playing against a less attractive female opponent, they had many more conservative draws. So they played a much more conservative stayed kind of chess, which is the standard kind of chess. When they played against attractive women, they lost more often and often because they took insane risks that they normally would never take.
It was like they were showing up flaunting their resources doing a great job of showing that resource-wise let's go back to the prairies that we roamed along when we were thousands and thousands of years ago and many generations ago.
It's like they went right back there, take the rational brain that is playing chess and throw it all the way back to generations ago when we were trying to impress the women on prairie, and these guys started to behave like that in front of the attractive women. They lost more often but occasionally they won in spectacular fashion because they tried moves that had never been tried before for good reason, because they were a bad idea.
The same is true of their opening gamuts. So I think a fantastic effect, you take the most rational men in the world that you can find, we can argue about that, bit stylized for the example, but these are very rational people who have pretty good strategies that they normally turn to and even they're swayed by the presence of other people, in particular attractive women.
>>: Two questions into one. How much was evolutionary psychology and how much towards Vadosky's theory about cult social definition.
>> Yuriy Brun: Good question. They don't really know. There may be multiple reasons why this might be happening. One is that it's biological, and that's the -- I think people like to favor that explanation because it's a little sexier and more interesting.
The other alternative is culturally we just think that's the way we deal with people who look a certain way. We scaffold over time and when we greet new people, we use existing theories that we have about the way the world works.
When you greet an attractive woman as a man, you're supposed to do certain

things. I think that's pretty good evidence that's not going on. They asked a lot of questions of these chess players and they have of others who swear that they're not doing anything like this. This is not going on; I'm not treating them any differently. I don't think I should have accorded them any leniency, or anything like that, which would be consistent with Barcofsky. The biological part is there, if you looked at testosterone levels, which I've done in other experiments. The rise in testosterone that comes when you're attracted to someone, it's correlated with this this idiocy, risky ill-advised behavior that suggest some serious biological links.
So that's all I want to talk about. Between us there's a lot more in the book that's all I'll talk about now here.
And I'll turn to the last part now. The world around us. And I want to focus on nature as a buffer against stress. Because I think for me when I was researching the book, this was one of the effects that I found most profound and striking, and it's one people ask me all the time: Have you changed the way you live based on this stuff. The answer is really not so much. But this is one thing I've thought about a lot especially living in the middle of
Manhattan that doesn't have much nature to offer. My view is buildings, pretty buildings but buildings. And really mainly just the walls of pretty buildings.
So the argument is if this little ant represents us with a stressor, can nature come between us and that source of stress? And I think it can. And I'll tell you about how that might be. And my favorite experience on this was conducted in the late '70s and early '80s at a hospital in Pennsylvania called Paoli
Memorial Hospital, and what happened at this hospital was people had gall bladder surgery over time a routine procedure but takes a bit of time to recover from it. It's now done arthroscopically. So the incision is very small. But at the time it was a much bigger operation. And they had 24 people in two different groups. And they matched these people which means that if we take person 24 in each group, they were matched on as many features as possible. This one was male 25, smoked about ten cigarettes a day, didn't exercise. The one in the other in the group was male, 24 years old, smoked about 12 a day, didn't exercise. Pretty similar. Their medical histories are about the same. Behavior patterns are the same. Exercise levels are the same.
So they're all matched up to someone in each group. But the groups differ in one way and that is this is the hospital from above this is the bird's-eye view this is the way the recovery rooms work they're all structured along this corridor that goes along here. And these are their rooms with windows that

look out. And what you have is a stand of trees here. It's not beautiful, but there's some trees. And that's something natural to look at. That's more appealing than something that isn't natural to look at.
What you find is that the people in this group one happen to be in rooms that looked out on to a brick wall. The people in group two happen to be in rooms where they were looking out on to the stand of trees. That was the only difference between them. They had the name nurses and the same doctors. They had exactly the same configuration of room. The only difference was what they saw when they looked out the window. So these people are looking out of the brick wall. These are looking out at a natural view, the stand of trees. And what they found, the researchers found is actually just one researcher, is that between days two and 5, this is when you've come out of the anesthetic if you experience pain it will be during these days. People in group one who looked at the brick wall required on average six and a half doses of heavy painkiller.
But only two and a half for those in group two. A little bit more than two and a half. So they required much less help from pain killers than people who were looking out at brick walls. It's as though nature was to some extent a painkiller for them. The other thing that was interesting was how long it took them to recover. It takes a few days for people to recover but by day six some of them start to leave and what you find is that they leave more quickly from group two. That by looking out at a natural view they were leaving much more rapidly and by day eight half of them in group two had left and by ten all of them in group two had left and there were still six patients in group one in the hospital the only difference that people could isolate was the difference in view. There was no other apparent difference.
Of course, that's a study with 48 people. It's not a huge study. It's a lot to conclude based on that one study. And since then there have been many, many studies that have shown the same thing. One study looked at children who had experienced great stress as children. And they were much better off. They were much better able to fight off that stress and to do better later in life if they had a back yard with greenery, this controlling for socioeconomic status for wealth and all of that, backyard with greenery, even pot plants in the homemade a difference.
So there were some very striking effects of nature on buffering against stress.
But that's not the only feature. Nature is not the only feature of environments that shapes how we think feel and behave and adjust and flourish.

This is Manhattan, this is part of Manhattan called Washington heights. Is anyone from Manhattan?
Anyone from New York? Okay. So this is a part of Manhattan. It's actually the only part where there's a big interstate that goes through, this is it, it comes off the George Washington bridge from New Jersey, and right through the northern part of Manhattan through Washington Heights, it's -- I-95 is one of the noisiest roads in all of America. And unfortunately for the people who live in these four buildings, these buildings are on top of I-95. Literally.
Not just like next to, but they're built over. There is a tunnel and they are built on top of the I-95 freeway. This is what the buildings look like. Four identical buildings and they're very tall. And researchers went in and wanted to see whether the difference in noise level in these different units, as you went up to, or different apartments as you go up to the 32nd floor mattered in any material way for people. So they measured the noise levels at these different levels from the first floor all the way up to the 32nd. At the first floor, the noise, as you'd expect, was akin to having a truck going by all the time. 86 decibels is about that level, which is distressing. At the eighth level the noise was lower. It was like having a vacuum cleaner on the whole time, which in research that we've done looking at annoying noises, is one of the most annoying noises. We use that to induce aversive reactions to put people through aversive experiences. They listen to a vacuum cleaner noise.
At the 20th floor, it's more like the hum you get from a busy department store.
Which is a bit less aversive. And at the very top floor it's like family by the fireside. Gentle crackling of the fire. It's a much more manageable noise. And so there's a very big difference between the first floor and the
32nd does this matter or does this matter turns out it does. One thing to note is the degree of noise that you get from the top there is a tenth as intense as the noise that you get from the bottom.
So there's a very big difference in the intensity of the noise. So one thing I thought was well we need to be able to hear better when we're young to pick up the differences in words. When you're learning vocabulary, that's very important. And there are certain sounds in the English language that are especially hard to distinguish. So what they did was they found some people who lived in these towers who had children. And they asked them to do a sound discrimination test. So they had them hear the word beer or gear and they asked them which word it was. It's hard to distinguish. Or rope and robe.
And what they found was the kids who lived lower down did much worse at this,

they did well at the top. They all scored about 100 percent. But then as you went down, they did a little bit more poorly. At the bottom here, on the eighth floor, they didn't look at the first floor because it was so noisy they just wanted to keep that out of it. But even at the eighth floor, these kids were doing a lot more poorly. It seemed as though their hearing had been badly affected. And when you look at their reading ability as a result, and they control for how wealthy these kids were, you might imagine wealthy people live higher up, so they're better educated or something like that, that wasn't the case. If you scale the scores on these tests, kids at the top scored 100.
Kids on the 20th floor scored 93 on reading. And kids on the eighth floor scored 87.
So the noise had profound effects on their ability to read. Except if they'd been there for less than four years. Because then their scores were almost indistinguishable. 199 and 98. So the idea is that if you're around this sort of noise for a long time, that's problematic. But if you move quickly enough it's okay. You'll overcome that problem so the noise has profound effects including how well kids learn to read. And so in an age where we have tiger parenting and helicopter parenting and very serious attempt to control a lot of features of children's lives things as seemingly immaterial as there's a pot plant in the home or kids playing outside a lot or whether you live high up or low down near a noisy road have often bigger effects than some of these very targeted interventions like sending kids for tutorials and classes and extra lessons. So I think that there's some pretty profound effects there. What
I've shown you now this is the table of contents of the book. I talked a little bit about names to begin and I moved on to talking about characteristics of other people women and attractive chess and finished at locations looking at nature and noise. And there's some other stuff there. I'm happy to chat about it if any of this seems interesting. And thank you very much for having me.
[applause]
Do we have time for some questions?
>>: Regarding the effect of color on people, sports, you and I are playing tennis, does it benefit you more if you're wearing red or if I'm wearing red?
>>: If there's an umpire it's especially important to be the one wearing red because you look more dominant and aggressive. Less so for tennis. Tennis is not the example that's probably best to illustrate the effect. But if you're playing -- do you know the Olympic result, do you know the effect?

>>: No, think of an English football club.
>> Yuriy Brun: So Liverpool, Manchester, United. It really matters in the
Olympics what happens is people when they're in combat sports, like Taekwondo,
Judo, wrestling, each bout they are drawn to wearing red or blue. It turns out when they're drawn to wear red or blue really matters. It matters for two reasons: One is you feel more aggressive and dominant when you wear red.
There's pretty good evidence for that, but more than that, when referees are grading you, giving you points, they will watch the same match, and then they've actually done this, they've switched the uniforms, digitally, and they watched the same match, where the blue and red have been switched, they will award the match differently depending on who wore red. It really does matter.
I am not sure about tennis. If you're wearing red in tennis or soccer you look more dominant. Maybe that helps. But in hockey if you wear black a lot of the uniforms when they change to black uniforms, some teams have done this in the past, the rate at which they're called for penalties skyrockets. So that's another concern. You look dominant but you also look more aggressive.
So some really interesting effects in the domain of sport.
>>: Seems like there's a difference between having like red and pink.
Something with the way you have red you're dominant but pink pacifies, do you think there's a reason for that, it's just a shade of basically --...
>>: The same color.
>> Yuriy Brun: Yeah, it is basically the same color. There was a great article a few years ago questioning whether pink was actually a color because pink is essentially red but it's indistinguishable in its physical properties but it's watered down a little bit. That's why I think a large part of this is the association.
So red we associate with the rush of blood that comes from aggression and anger and dominance in a romantic context turns out you're more likely to attract a mate on online dating sites if you wear red because the rush red is supposed to signal a sexual interest the main difference there for me is associational and it's not the physical properties of the color so that's a good reason to believe that, I believe, I think yes.

>>: Any studies on nonhuman animals for instance and effective color something that transcends [inaudible] norms.
>> Yuriy Brun: Yes. I think the color chapter is the one that resides most squarely in biology and evolution. And it's true about a lot of animals. I start not talking about humans when I talk about red but other animals.
There's a lot of species that show their dominance by having either a redder face or when they get angry they go red or when they're in heat they turn red.
And so red is particularly important in the animal kingdom. To some extent it also changes how much you'd like to eat food. So some colors signal to us that food is ripe for eating. And I think other animals make use of that information as well.
So definitely it's not just about humans. It's about other species as well.
>>: Is there also like a capability of turning off the effect of your conscious of it or is it just so overwhelming that you just cannot avoid it?
>> Yuriy Brun: Yeah, this is a good question about everything in the book.
And some effects psychologists talk about discounting, the ability to discount the effect if you know that it's there. Some of these effects there's an obvious way to discount them. And others there just isn't. It's tapping into something biological, and even though you know it's there you can try and fight it but somehow it's probably still going to interact with your judgment.
I try to spell that out. And I think it's the biological effects that are the hardest ones to overcome. But of course if you're a referee and you're watching a match and there's someone wearing blue and someone wearing red you might say to yourself I'm going to do everything I can to minimize my attention to the red and but how do you do that? It's really hard to see how you would do it in an effective way. Sometimes what we end up doing unfortunately is overcorrecting or overdiscounting, where no matter what the red person, person wearing red does you assume you're seeing them dominant because they're wearing red it's a tricky issue, sometimes that makes the recommendations that flow from this stuff a little bit complex.
>>: What are your thoughts about applying a signal to maladaptive computer behavior. So you talk a lot about color. But in order to have an effective signalling to the subconscious, for maladaptive, not covering for the normal use but more to the abnormal use.

>> Yuriy Brun: Yeah, so people have asked a lot of questions about how we can apply this to interfaces and computer screens. There's some great research showing the different colors make a wait seem more or less long, if they're waiting for a Web page to load some signals signal they're not waiting as others if you make the page red you'll make them think they're waiting longer there's research looking at how we can make people better consumers of digital information based upon the colors we use and various other signals. So there's certainly some of that as well. Yes?
>>: Do you have any information on extraneous factors affecting people's credulity, I work in security and I'm trying to figure out how to help people not fall prey to social engineering attacks like it's all this free antivirus software, it will help. Sure it will.
>> Yuriy Brun: I've done research on this and one of the factors that matters is fluency in names names harder to pronounce than others. If you make the interface disfluent, people are less likely to share stuff about themselves.
And the one domain we looked at was an online anonymous confessions website.
And the website changed its format. It was a very disfluent format for a while then went to a fluent format and people were much more willing to share stuff about themselves when it went to the fluent format we have a lot of lab experiments as well that isolate the feature. Disfluency makes you feel like something's not right I need to recruit extra mental resources need to be a little more vigilant, think a little more carefully, something doesn't seem quite right here. And so if you can somehow encourage that information to be processed less easily, it sends up alarms for people.
>>: Fun with colors like here's content from someone we don't know whether to trust or not. Can the operating system put a big red box or a big pink box around it to manage whether it can be trusted?
>> Yuriy Brun: Absolutely. In fact there was a study that showed recently you could take very unhealthy food and put a green label on it and people think it's healthy. That's very recent. And so we are very -- the associations we have of these colors are very powerful. And I think red, it makes a lot of sense there's already a lot of use of red.
>>: Everywhere.

>> Yuriy Brun: Yeah. Absolutely.
>>: Do you have an idea between how many of these cues are biological and many cultural because it seems like there's a feedback loop, like you said Barack at the beginning it wasn't that fluid but it creates fluency by itself and the same thing about these effects as we go into the, it became more --
>> Yuriy Brun: I don't think it's fruitful to try to parse out the separate contributions, if we look at red and the biology of red for mating and courtship behavior, I think the ultimate origin of the red effect is biological. I think animals recognize other animals sexual interest by their faces being more flush. But we know that if you look at Valentine's Day and the fem fatale and red dress and all that stuff, that's probably all an outgrowth of this biological effect. And as you say there's a feedback loop.
Now to know whether it's the biological effect that's operating or the association that came from biological effect, it's really hard to know. But I think both are operating in a lot of these cases, not all of them. Like the color blue makes us -- it's the world's favorite color. Almost every country in the world likes blue more than other colors that's. True of people across the world and I think that's because of the association we have for a lot of reasons. Yes.
>>: What's the most neutral colors? Meaning there's no effect?
>> Yuriy Brun: That's a great question. I haven't found one yet that has no effects. So even shades, black white and grain have effects as well. The reason I say that is because we were trying to work out these sports uniforms, red and blue are so powerful and black is so powerful, what can we do? There isn't a really great answer except to say one that's slightly darker gray than another, which would be very boring to watch it would take us back to the black and white TV and it would be, it would change the nature of the game, I think, quite dramatically. But there isn't a good answer to that. Did you have some online questions?
>>: Going back to names, there was a positive association with names that are also used for names at different association with men whose names are associated --

>> Yuriy Brun: Yes. Yes. The two big dimensions in human social interaction are warmth and competence, the ideal is to find someone who is both warm and competent. Which means they're warm intentions towards you are good and competent able to make those intentions a reality.
The feminity of the name weighs heavily on the woman component. If you name a boy, when he's born, something very masculine and give him a middle name something like Maluma, that might be effective. Capture all the domains if you can. A friend of mine has named his daughter with a fairly strong independent first name, and her middle name is Maluma. So people do use this stuff. They take it pretty seriously.
>>: I want to mention that there's still some $10 books available if anyone's interested and thank you so much for coming and we'll be signing books afterwards.
>> Yuriy Brun: Thank you.
[applause]