Making Life Decisions on a Coin Flip, How You Respond to 2 Types of Injustice, and Why Otters Juggle Rocks

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6 • 964 Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Learn about why flipping a coin might be your best bet when making major life decisions; why otters juggle rocks; and how you respond differently to 2 types of injustice.

An economist had people make big life decisions on a coin flip, and they ended up happier by Steffie Drucker

Study finds people are more satisfied after quitting the status quo. (2020, May 18). Oxford University Press; Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-05-people-status-quo.html
Levitt, S. D. (2020). Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness. The Review of Economic Studies. https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdaa016
Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1994). The temporal pattern to the experience of regret. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 357–365. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.357

We finally found out why otters juggle rocks by Kelsey Donk

Otters juggle stones when hungry, research shows. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-05/uoe-ojs050520.php
The drivers and functions of rock juggling in otters | Royal Society Open Science. (2020). Royal Society Open Science. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.200141#d1e1439
Ashley’s viral tweet: https://twitter.com/smashleyhamer/status/1131584661883359232?lang=en

There are 2 Types of Injustice and You Respond Differently to Each of Them by Ashley Hamer

van Prooijen, J.-W. (2009). Retributive versus compensatory justice: Observers’ preference for punishing in response to criminal offenses. European Journal of Social Psychology, n/a-n/a. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.611
Galak, J., & Chow, R. M. (2019). Compensate a little, but punish a lot: Asymmetric routes to restoring justice. PLOS ONE, 14(1), e0210676. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210676

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0:00.0	Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from
0:04.9	Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about
0:09.2	why flipping a coin might be your best bet when making major life decisions, why otters juggle rocks, and how you
0:15.8	respond differently to two types of injustice.
0:18.8	Let's satisfy some curiosity.
0:20.8	Ashley, do you ever flip a coin to make decisions?
0:24.0	Yeah I do sometimes because I find that even if I don't like which side it lands on that just tells me which decision I really wanted to make.
0:32.0	Okay, you're generally pretty happy with those. me which decision I really wanted to make.
0:33.0	Okay, you're generally pretty happy with those decisions?
0:36.0	Yeah, I think so.
0:37.1	Okay.
0:38.1	Well, I don't do that quite as often.
0:39.8	But for those of us who do use coin flips,
0:42.8	a new study found that people who followed through on those coin flip decisions
0:47.4	ended up happier.
0:49.0	And that says something important about how we make decisions.
0:53.6	Even though economics has a lot to say about how people think about making decisions,
0:58.4	it says nothing about whether a decision they make is the right one. Economist Stephen Leavitt, co-author of the 2005 book Freakonomics, was perturbed by this fact.
1:08.0	So Leavitt set out to fill this gap by putting up a website that let people make decisions with a coin toss.
1:15.2	It provided a list of possible decisions and let people choose the one that most matched the
1:20.0	decision they were trying to make. Those decisions ranged from big ones, like whether to quit a job or
1:26.4	proposed to a romantic partner, to smaller ones, like whether to go on a diet or get a tattoo,
	...

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