Hi everybody this is Scott Sad back in 2010 I wrote an article on my

psychology today column wherein I asked people whether they would be willing to play Russian roulette for $5 million.

And in this case, I argued that the gun in question would have six chambers for the bullets and so therefore

you know five of the bullets would be blank one would be an actual bullet and for those of you

who don't know Russian roulette you know you just you you

turn the the chamber and then you pull the trigger and if you know it's the one that has the

live bullet then you're dead and then if on the other hand five out of six chances

you would live so would you be willing to you know risk your life we have one one six

chance of dying five and six chances of winning the five million dollars of course in psychology of decision-making this

is where you would calculate the expected value of a gamble right so you would

calculate the probability of each of the possible states of events multiplied by the costs or benefits of that event.

So in this case it would be five-sixth of winning five million dollars plus one-sixth of dying.

Now whatever you'd have to find the currency for that tragic reality. but in any case,

I like those games because they often tell us

important things about how we weigh different outcomes,

different states of the world. way different

states of the world how we calculate you know economists love to talk about utility function and utility

maximization so it's a way of getting a sense of how people navigate through

the vicissitudes of life, right? And so within that spirit I often will, when we're walking around with my family, I will say, let's

say we're at the beach and we see a buoy that's one kilometer out.

I'll say, you know, would you be willing to at night when it's completely dark

swim out to that buoy that's a kilometer away touch it and come back and how much

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