Speaker 1: The newcomers are called killer bees. The potential invaders are predicted to reach the Texas border by 1989.
Speaker 2: A simple glitch is threatening a new age of chaos, the second the world's computers click over to the year 2000.
Speaker 3: All right, so look, this is pretty alarming. NASA is working right now to prevent an internet apocalypse.
Katy Milkman: Sometimes it seems like every story in the news is hailed as the most earth-shattering, most consequential update imaginable. Journalists, professors, social media stars, friends, and colleagues breathlessly explain why it's exciting or it's terrifying or why it somehow paints a clear picture of the future, even though that future may never come to pass. In this episode, we'll look at the peculiar way we respond to breaking information, the new signals that arrive in our environment, even when that information is actually not all that monumental.
Speaker 5: On the list of potential Republican contenders for the White House in 2016, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush is the clear number one according to a new poll.
Katy Milkman: And when it matters immensely.
Speaker 6: I cannot stress this enough, do not ignore evacuation orders. Remember, we can rebuild your home, but we cannot rebuild your life.
Katy Milkman: I'm Dr. Katy Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.
David Silbey: The American position in the world was actually kind of awkward in the 1880s and 1890s. We were a growing power, our economy was certainly surging, but we hadn't developed the kind of military capabilities that countries like Britain, and France, and Russia had developed.
Katy Milkman: This is David.
David Silbey: I'm David Silbey. I'm a military historian at Cornell University.
Katy Milkman: The 1890s were a time of massive change for the United States. The Civil War was over, the industrial revolution had transformed commerce. Technological innovation was accelerating, and world powers were shifting. We're going to talk about how the U.S. Navy responded to this changing dynamic, and how one particular event hastened the decline of an empire. The story centers around one particular ship: the USS Maine.
David Silbey: The USS Maine was built to assert American authority outside of the United States. You have to understand the strategic problem that the U.S. had in the 1890s, which is we had both an East Coast and a West Coast, and it was virtually impossible to get between the two of them with any kind of speed and with any kind of large military force.
Katy Milkman: This was a time before the Panama Canal and before the Northwest Passage had been successfully navigated. This meant that if America was attacked, say, on the Atlantic side, and all of the country's ships were on the Pacific side, Americans would be in trouble. So it seemed wise to begin to build a big fleet of modern warships on both coasts.
David Silbey: Steam-powered, made of iron, carrying heavy guns that could range for miles.
Katy Milkman: The USS Maine was one of the first ships built for this modern fleet.
David Silbey: It's this very large steel ship, weighed about 6 or 7,000 tons, which is small by today's standards, but was pretty big back then. It carried a crew of about 300 to 350. It relied on coal to burn to create the steam to drive the steam engines.
Katy Milkman: After it was built, the Maine was sent to a strategic location.
David Silbey: If we wanted to be a world power, we had to control our backyard, and that most particularly meant the Caribbean. The way to do that was to evict anybody who was a threat to us. And in this case, the main rival to the United States in the Western Hemisphere was Spain.
Katy Milkman: The Spanish empire was in decline, but it still controlled a number of islands in the Caribbean, including Cuba.
David Silbey: And so almost immediately as America starts thinking about being this global power, we realized that we have to deal with the Spanish. The challenge is the Spanish are having real problems as well because the Cubans in Cuba are trying to break free from Spain. "Cuba libre!" was the cry, "Free Cuba!" And the Spanish were handling it very badly indeed. They were committing atrocities against the Cubans; they were pulling civilians away from their homes and lands to cut them off from the resistance fighters. The publicity around that kind of humanitarian catastrophe was really riling up the American public. The new mass media, new newspapers that had come in during the 1880s and 1890s never avoided a big headline when they had the chance. One of the publishers, a guy named William Randolph Hearst, told one of his reporters, "You get me the pictures. I'll get you the war." President William McKinley, who is not particularly an aggressive president, finds himself in this encounter with the Spanish that he doesn't necessarily really want to be, but he doesn't have much of a choice.
Katy Milkman: The political pressure was on. Cuba was vying for independence. Spain was trying to hold on to its shrinking empire, and the U.S. was trying to assert dominance in the region. Enter the USS Maine.
David Silbey: The Maine was sent down to Cuba because there were riots going on in the city. The Cuban population of Havana was rising up against their Spanish overlords. And the Maine was sent down ostensibly as a way of protecting the Americans living in Havana, but it was also sent as a way of showing the flag. This is the biggest, one of the most technologically advanced warships in the American fleet. So this is a way of showing Spain American power in its most physical and most visceral form. It's a warning. It's a threat to the Spanish that the U.S. is there, and the U.S. Navy can reach them if they have to.
Katy Milkman: It's nighttime on February 15th, 1898. The weather in Havana is cool but comfortable, no rain. The USS Maine is docked in Havana Harbor with the full crew aboard.
David Silbey: There was a Spanish cruiser in the harbor, there were a number of freighters. So it was a typical day in a working harbor. There were ships around, a lot of people around. The captain of the Maine, a gentleman by the name of Charles Sigsbee was actually sitting at his office desk at about 9:40 at night, and he was writing his daily report. He was way in the back in his berth, and all of a sudden there was this giant, powerful, explosive noise coming from very close by. And then a series of what he said were metallic noises, and he thought they were the masts of the Maine collapsing in on each other.
He runs from his berth and it's dark. All the lights have gone out within the Maine. He's struggling to find his way out. And when he gets out, what he sees is that the front third of the ship has essentially been ripped in half, that it's open to the air. He can see down into the ship itself. It's rapidly filling with water and slowly sinking. It would've been a very sort of visceral physical experience for anyone who was part of this. The other part of this was that they were worried they were going to die because would the flames get to them, would there be another explosion. And so they're watching as ships across the harbor are actually rushing to get to them.
Katy Milkman: It's worth noting that one of the ships coming to their aid was a Spanish cruiser. Smaller boats rushed in as well.
David Silbey: It's very sudden. There was no warning at all, no expectation that this was going to happen. They weren't in battle. They were at anchor. Everybody was finishing a busy day, and suddenly this giant explosion tears the ship in half.
Katy Milkman: One of the people who heard the explosion was Fitzhugh Lee, the American Consul to Cuba.
David Silbey: He sends a message to President McKinley essentially saying, "The Maine has blown up. We don't have any idea what caused it, might've been an accident, might've been an attack." And then sort of charges off to the hospitals to try and talk to the sailors and the other survivors. So the explosion is almost immediately known back in the United States and almost immediately public. There are a lot of reporters in Havana. They are sending messages back to their publishers. Some of them are getting pictures of the wreckage when the morning comes. And the story that they tell is a story that fits the narrative that they've been selling all along: "This is an attack by the Spanish. This is Spanish treachery. They have clearly blown up an American warship as a way of striking back at the United States." It's a deliberate choice by the reporters and by their publishers to make a decision about what had happened, well short of actually knowing what had happened.
Katy Milkman: Newspaper headlines the next day were filled with outrage demanding that the Spanish be punished. Rewards for information on the perpetrators were offered.
David Silbey: The Maine never disappears from view in Havana Harbor. The masts are always sticking up. It's almost a headstone in a graveyard that is a constant reminder that this catastrophic explosion has happened.
Katy Milkman: There were about 350 sailors and marines on the warship. 268 were killed.
David Silbey: And that's really the largest loss of American life in a warship between the Civil War and, I think, World War I. It is this massive shock to the American Navy, which is still fairly small and to the American public. This is the start of creating a popular legend around the Maine that is connected with a Spanish attack and not waiting to find out what actually happened.
Katy Milkman: The phrase "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain" became a rallying cry. Americans demanded action.
David Silbey: One of the reasons why people decided that Spain was at fault was because they had been primed for it for years. They had been primed to believe, rightly so, that the Spanish were treating the Cubans horribly, that the Spanish were resentful of the United States and the growing power there. And so this fit well into that belief. This fit well into this idea. Also, and to be fair to everyone, it's a little bit surprising for warship to just suddenly blow up. Now, that's actually less rare than you might think, but for the American public to see one of their costliest warships blow up, they needed someone to blame, and Spain was it. There was nothing to indicate internally or externally that the Spanish had done it.
Katy Milkman: I just want to reiterate that—there was no real evidence that the Spanish were involved. In fact, the Spanish seemed as shocked as anyone else in Cuba, as demonstrated by their attempts to save American soldiers in the Havana Harbor.
David Silbey: There wasn't a lot of evidence about what caused the explosion of the Maine, it was very difficult for them to reach the warship itself. There were likely to have been secondary explosions. The magazine of the warship was full of highly explosive ammunition for use in the guns. Whatever the initial explosion was, the ammunition would've blown up. So, it was very hard to tell what had caused it. Most of the eyewitnesses were dead.
Katy Milkman: Even without evidence, the political situation remained tense.
David Silbey: Poor William McKinley, he's trying to find a reasonably peaceful way between the two sides. He's not a humanitarian. He's a businessman. He comes from the business wing of the Republican Party. He doesn't want a war because it'll disrupt trade. It'll send Wall Street down. And he's finessing this delicate situation. And in the middle of these delicate negotiations, quite literally, an explosion comes. And to a large degree, his range of options become completely circumscribed. The American public is demanding war. Congress, for the most part, is demanding war. The Cubans are demanding war. And so for McKinley, he is very restricted in what he can do. So he goes to Congress with a declaration of war.
Katy Milkman: The cause of the dramatic explosion of the USS Maine remains unclear to this day. What is clear is that it caused a tragic loss of life. And in the context of deteriorating relations with Spain, the American public, thanks to the American news media, interpreted it as a meaningful signal of Spain's intentions. The American public wanted their government to act, but without proof of any actual Spanish aggression, was a declaration of war an overreaction? Fortunately, for the Americans anyway, it was a relatively short war. It only lasted seven months, though any unnecessary conflict of any length is unquestionably a tragedy.
David Silbey: When the Spanish-American War started, everybody thought it was about an equal fight. It turned out not to be. It turned out that the Spanish empire was a lot more decayed, a lot less powerful, than everybody thought. And so both in the naval battles that the U.S. and Spain fought and in the land battles, the U.S. essentially mopped the floor with the Spanish. So, the war ends much quicker than everybody thinks, and the Spanish give Cuba independence. And then bizarrely, they also sell us the Philippines. And so we end up coming out of it not only the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, but also suddenly an Asian power.
Katy Milkman: Even though it was a short and successful war for the U.S., it was predicated on incomplete and weak information. Did the Spanish actually attack or sabotage the USS Maine? The short answer is probably not.
David Silbey: Back in the 1970s, a commission led by a very senior American admiral by the name of Hyman Rickover went back and examined the evidence. They went back and looked at the wreckage. They concluded that the armor plates were bowed outward as if the explosion was internal. And what they concluded seems to me the most plausible explanation, which is one of the dangers that coal powered warships had was that coal would give off what was called coal gas or bunker gas. When it was sitting, stored in a bunker exposed to oxygen, it would give off a gas that was highly, highly explosive. So what Rickover's commission came to analyze was that the crew of the warship had not properly vented the coal, that there was a buildup of this coal gas during the stay at Havana Harbor, and that the night of February 15th, it blew up and then caused the ammunition armory right next to it to also blow up, and that's what destroyed the Maine. So, after all this time, after all this drama, after this war, it most likely was a tragic accident.
Katy Milkman: David Silbey is a military historian and adjunct associate professor and director of teaching and learning at Cornell University. His new book is called Wars Civil and Great: The American Experience in the Civil War and World War I. You can find links to his work in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
The explosion of the USS Maine was dramatic, but the cause of the explosion was not clear from the outset. That this tragedy led to an all-out war illustrates how easy it is to misinterpret and overreact to incomplete or low-quality information, especially when we're already focused on a question, in this case, whether the Spanish and Cuba were our friends or our foes. A similar example can be found during the Vietnam era when erroneously interpreted radar signals from the Gulf of Tonkin and the subsequently skewed intelligence that followed led to the U.S. engaging more directly in what would turn out to be a disastrous war. In both cases, the overreaction to weak information led to consequential and deadly decisions.
My next guest has done a fascinating series of research studies documenting people's systematic tendency to overreact to weak signals as in these two military examples and also to underreact to strong signals. I'm excited for you to learn more from him about this pattern of bias in our decisions, why it arises, and the consequences. Ned Augenblick is a professor in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. Hi, Ned. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Ned Augenblick: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited.
Katy Milkman: Me too. And in particular, I am really excited to talk about the way people update their beliefs in response to different types of information. You have specifically focused on what you call strong signals and weak signals, and I want to start by just asking you to define and give a few examples of what weak signals are.
Ned Augenblick: So weak signals are mostly what we get every day. I mean, just think about your day. You're walking around, and you look at the news, and something happened. There's some poll numbers, or your kid had a bad day at school, or your boss tells you that you did a good job. All of those things are kind of meaningful for the future, but not terribly meaningful for the future. So I would define those as being pretty weak. They're things that should change your beliefs, but not by much, basically.
Katy Milkman: Those are great examples, and that's really helpful. And then could you also define a strong signal and give us an example of what a strong signal would be?
Ned Augenblick: So a strong signal is in some sense the opposite. All of these are about you have some beliefs about the future, let's say the likelihood that a vaccine is effective, or the likelihood that your kid needs to be moved to a different school, and a strong signal there is something that moves your beliefs a lot or should move your beliefs a lot. And so your boss comes to you and says, "You did a horrible job. If you don't change your behavior immediately, I will fire you." That's a pretty strong signal. And so that's the difference. It's just how much should you update your beliefs given that signal. Strong, a lot. Weak, not much.
Katy Milkman: Great. And it could be beliefs about anything, right? Because there are signals about all kinds of things, whether it's the stock market's future performance, or whether or not I'm going to have a job in a month, or whether my child is going to get into college.
Ned Augenblick: Exactly.
Katy Milkman: All of those things could have weak signals and strong signals that would inform them.
Ned Augenblick: Exactly right. I mean, "Am I going to be late to this meeting or not?" Well, that depends on what's happening in my day. "Am I going to be able to pick up my kid on time?" Constantly throughout the day, although you don't realize it, you're receiving information about things, and it's changing your perspective of how the future is going to play out.
Katy Milkman: I love that. So I know a lot of past research has focused on strong signals, and it shows that we tend to underreact to strong signals. And I was wondering if we could start actually by having you describe how past studies in this literature on belief updating have demonstrated this general tendency for humans to underreact to strong signals.
Ned Augenblick: So it's a big topic, right? And it's very important for people's behavior how do people react to signals. And what we would love to know is how people are reacting to real-life signals. And the issue is that we don't necessarily know how they should react. If your boss tells you that you did a terrible job, what should you react to? How should you react? And so instead, what scientists often do is they go into a laboratory where they get a bunch of people to show up and they present them with an abstract situation where the answer is actually there's an objective correct answer. And that way, they can see, are people overreacting or underreacting?
Let me give you the style. There are many studies like this. One very common style would be something like the following: There's two decks of cards. One of them, let's say the first deck, has a lot of black cards in it. The other deck has a lot of red cards and fewer black cards. Now, suppose that what I do is I take one of those decks random, and I show you a card and I ask you to guess which deck I took. So, if I show you a black card, it makes you think that, "Well, the first deck's probably more likely." If I show you a red card, it makes you feel like the second deck is probably more likely.
Now, you can vary the number of red and black cards in a way that changes how strong that signal is. Suppose, for example, that the first deck was all black cards, the second deck was all red cards. Well, if I pull out a black card, you know it's the first deck. On the flip side, if the first deck has 51% of cards are black, and the second deck, 51% of the cards are red, when I show you a black card, it's just not that meaningful. It should give you a hint that it's the first deck, but again, it's a weak signal. You shouldn't change your beliefs that much.
And so with this paradigm, people have tried to figure out, do people react correctly, or do they underreact or overreact? And again, the great thing here is that you know what the right answer is. So what most people do is they do this type of study. Oftentimes, I think the most standard would be like 75% black and then 75% red. And those are pretty strong signals. And what they find is that people are underreacting to that. And so it turns out that in that case, if, let's say, it was 75% black and 75% red on the other deck, and I pull out a black card, you should actually update from 50% to 75%. Instead, people are updating, let's say, from 50% to 65% or something like that.
Katy Milkman: So just to interrupt. When you say update, the person's job who's looking at these decks, I just want to clarify right, is I am making a guess about which deck it is, and I'm telling you how confident I am that's …
Ned Augenblick: Exactly.
Katy Milkman: … the first deck or the second deck, and I do that every time you show me a new card. I give you my updated guess. And if I am updating rationally, then I should have a very strong reaction when I see a black card, and I say, "It's much more likely then that this deck is a 75% black deck." That's kind of the idea?
Ned Augenblick: Yes, exactly right. And, again, I mean the funny thing is we're trying to mirror is the real-life situation where you see a news story, where you get some news from your boss, but that's hard to do. So we create this artificial environment where we know what the right answer is, and then when I pull a card, I know exactly what you should think if you were updating in some sense rationally based on using the right mathematical formula, and then I can see what you actually do think.
Katy Milkman: So, in these kinds of stylized experiments, the tendency for most of research's history was that people were focusing on these strong signals and seeing an underreaction.
Ned Augenblick: Yep.
Katy Milkman: But then in your work, you've actually taken a pivot, and you've actually looked at both weak signals and strong signals. Could you talk a little bit about some of the work you've done and what you've found?
Ned Augenblick: Yeah. And we had this suspicion, just given the theory, that our sense is that people do overreact to smaller signals. So, if you give people a pretty weak signal, again, that's something like 51% of the first deck is black and 51% of the second deck is red, then people kind of jump a little bit. When they see a black card, they jump more than they should.
Katy Milkman: So what you're saying is there's two decks. The first deck you tell me it's 51% black cards, the second is 51% red cards, then you show me a black card and say, "What's your probability to estimate that this is deck one?" I become too confident that it's deck one relative to the very small signal and very weak signal I've received. So I overreact to that very minor piece of information.
Ned Augenblick: That's exactly right.
Katy Milkman: One of the other things I love about your work is that you've left the laboratory because you do care about the real world, and you also have some data from the field that provides evidence of this underreaction to strong signals and overreaction to weak signals. Could you talk a bit about that evidence?
Ned Augenblick: Yeah. So I'll start by just saying a big trade-off in behavioral science research is you go to the lab, and it's great because you have control of exactly what happens. You can define the problem. You know exactly the right answer. The cost is that it's kind of artificial, and we don't know whether people solve problems in the lab the same way that they deal with real-life information. Now, you go into the field, and the problem is you have no idea what the right answer is. So the challenging part is trying to figure out, how can we come up with some methods that give us some proxy of what people think? And then even though we don't know the exact right answer, trying to figure out whether they underreact or overreact. And so what we do is come up with a mathematical method that tries to pinpoint when exactly people are overreacting and when people are underreacting.
Then, our next thing is we have to get data. And what we'd like in data is beliefs over time. Now, it's very hard to get a person's instantaneous beliefs over time, but what you can get is a market price over time. So, for example, now it's become more popular, there are betting markets on, let's say, sports. And at any instant in a game, there are odds, a market price where people have settled as the kind of right price to pay for that game that gives you a hint of how likely it is that, let's say, team A wins that game. So now you have these proxies for people's beliefs. You have this measure for overreaction and underreaction that we've developed, and then you have to figure out a way to vary the strength of the signal. What we use is time.
And so I'll give you an example. Suppose that you're watching a basketball game and the score is 8-4 in the first quarter. There's a lot that can happen. It's a signal for sure that the team that's currently winning is going to win, but it's not a very strong signal. And what we find is that people overreact to those signals. They think they're more meaningful than they are. At the end of the game, you can often get very strong signals. So, if a team goes from being up by two points to being up by four points with 30 seconds left, that's a very strong signal. And what we find is that people underreact to those signals. And so the basic idea is we're finding similar evidence both in the lab and in the field that people are overreacting to these weak signals and underreacting to these strong signals.
Katy Milkman: Could you describe what you think drives this tendency you've documented for people to over respond to weak signals and under respond to strong ones?
Ned Augenblick: I mean, I think in some sense it's a pretty simple theory. The basic idea is that a lot of times you just don't know what the information means. You can often tell if it's good or bad news, but you're just not quite sure how powerful the news is. And our theory is basically what that causes people to do is kind of they see a low-quality information, they see high-quality information, and they can't fully distinguish between the two. So they start to treat them more equally than they should. So, if you do that, what that means is that you're going to think of low-quality signals as being more valuable than they are, you're going to think of high-quality signals as being less valuable than they are, and that's going to cause this pattern of over and underreaction.
Katy Milkman: That's a really elegant explanation, and it relates to the way that we often talk about people making mistakes, which is we use these heuristics or rules of thumb that are sort of right on average but can be wrong in a lot of situations. So it's a really elegant explanation.
Ned Augenblick: Yep. I think that's exactly right. It's like you're right on average, which is great, but on an individual level when you think about these low-value signals or high-value signals, you're just not reacting as appropriately as you should.
Katy Milkman: Could you give us a little context of why you think we should all care about this bias or heuristic?
Ned Augenblick: The easiest thing to say is that beliefs determine actions, particularly with the small signals. Every day you're watching the news, and you're just bouncing all around about the probability that you think that there's going to be a recession. That might cause you to kind of take decisions that you shouldn't be taking. Some small thing happens and you kind of overreact to that is not a good thing. And so if we think that beliefs determine actions, and we think that beliefs are wrong, and in particular people are bouncing around too much, then that means that they're in some sense going to change their action too much.
I will say as an aside that there's a set of people, the media and news, who appreciate that you don't quite know how to interpret signals. The way that they're going to sell with their product is by making you think those signals are really meaningful. If you show up and watch the daily news, and they just say, "Look, today honestly nothing really interesting happened." Well, you're going to turn off the news. If instead they say, "This poll came out, this criminal indictment came out, this thing happened to the stock market, this is big news," and they say that every single day, that's going to cause you to, I think, overreact because you're not quite sure what it means.
And so honestly, I try to avoid news, in some sense of kind of daily news. And when I see it, I really try to step back and ask myself, "How meaningful is this piece of news? Is this thing really telling me a lot, or is it just an anecdote or something that's being sold to me as being very meaningful?"
Katy Milkman: I think this is a perfect place to wrap up because you've covered all the things I wanted to make sure we covered so we could share this with our listeners. So let me just say, Ned, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. This has been fascinating.
Ned Augenblick: I've had a great time. Thank you so much.
Katy Milkman: Ned Augenblick is a professor in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. You can find a link to the paper he co-authored with Eben Lazarus and Michael Thaler called "Overinference from Weak Signals and Underinference from Strong Signals" in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
What I hope this episode helps you appreciate is that we're not great differentiators. Whether you hear information from a credible source or a poor one, whether it's diagnostic or vague, you probably treat it too similarly. Put another way, if you hear the score in a ball game earlier or late, the strength of your reaction and change in your expectations about who will win is probably not as different as it should be. And if you hear a presidential poll result long before election day or close to election day, you, again, probably don't differentiate much. Or take another example. When you hear a scary rumor from a friend, a reputable newspaper, or a stranger you follow on social media, your reaction is probably pretty similar.
But what Ned's research tells us is that we should spend a bit more time considering the quality of any piece of information that comes our way before we react. If we realize that information is not very diagnostic, we should try to take a deep breath, recognizing we're at serious risk of overreacting. On the flip side, we can all also benefit from appreciating the human tendency to underreact to extremely high-quality information. So the next time you hear a rumor, a game score, an earnings announcement, or get any other piece of information that might be relevant to a meaningful future decision, take a moment to consider whether you're at risk of overreacting to a weak signal or underreacting to a strong one.
As a scientist, questions I ask to assess information quality from a new research finding are questions like the following: Did the study have a large representative sample size, or did it just involve a handful of people with a lot in common, say, all undergraduates at an Ivy League university? Was it designed using the gold standard, an experimental test, or is it trying to make a lot out of a mere correlation? Is the outcome of interest measured objectively or with the survey question? Has it been replicated? Is the author of the study being paid by someone who wants to see a certain result? By thinking a bit more deeply about information quality, you may be able to adjust your reaction and meaningfully improve your decision quality.
You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter on Substack, Milkman Delivers, at katymilkman.com/newsletter.
Next time, you'll hear about how dramatically we're affected by the ease of taking an action, whether it's one-click shopping or a subscription that requires an in-person meeting to cancel. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 9: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.
