What Wikipedia’s Success Reveals About Trust & Are We All Too Fearful?

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Speaker 3 Today, on something you should know, why the most common test-taking advice you hear is completely wrong.

Speaker 3 Then some great insight into trust from the founder of Wikipedia, which runs entirely on trust.

Speaker 4 The lessons that I've learned through Wikipedia, the lessons of my career about trust, like how do you build trust when people inherently start off saying, oh, this is crazy.

Speaker 4 Like anybody can edit anything. That sounds completely insane.
And why would I trust that?

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Speaker 3 Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 3 You know, my mother was a teacher. First, she was a nurse, and then she taught nursing for several years.

Speaker 3 And I remember she used to tell her students, and she used to tell me, that when you take a test and you're not sure about your answer go with your first answer but is that really good advice that's what we're going to start with today hi and welcome to this episode of something you should know

Speaker 3 we've all heard the advice that when you take a multiple choice test and you're not sure go with your first answer teachers test prep books My mom have repeated that for generations.

Speaker 3 And it sounds reasonable. After all, your first instinct should be your best, right?

Speaker 3 Well, no, that turns out to be not true.

Speaker 3 A large body of research covering seven decades of studies shows that test takers who reconsider and change their answers actually tend to end up with higher overall test scores.

Speaker 3 Psychologists have looked at thousands of exams from classroom tests, SAT-style tests, DMV-type quizzes, and over and over again the same pattern appears.

Speaker 3 When people actually change an answer, they're far more likely to switch from wrong to right than from right to wrong.

Speaker 3 So where does this trust your first instinct myth come from and why does it persist?

Speaker 3 Well, it's because of something called the first instinct fallacy. It's a mental bias we all share.
When we change a correct answer to a wrong one, it sticks in our memory.

Speaker 3 We feel regret and we remember it. But we tend to forget all the times we've changed answers that actually helped us.

Speaker 3 In other words, we remember the emotional sting of being wrong more vividly than the quiet success of being right.

Speaker 3 So, experts say the best strategy during a multiple-choice test is to mark any question you're unsure about, move on, and come back later with a fresh perspective.

Speaker 3 And that is something you should know.

Speaker 3 Chances are you've looked up something recently on Wikipedia. We all have.
It is the largest collection of knowledge in human history and it is built entirely by volunteers.

Speaker 3 And when you think about it, it is also one of the great experiments in trust.

Speaker 3 Users have to trust that Wikipedia is accurate and Wikipedia has to trust that its editors, who are all volunteers, are acting in in good faith. Somehow, against all odds, it works.

Speaker 3 My guest is Jimmy Wales. He's the founder of Wikipedia, and he knows a thing or two about how trust is built and maintained.

Speaker 3 He's also the author of The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last.

Speaker 3 Hey, Jimmy, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 4 Hi there. Thanks for having me.
It's good to be here.

Speaker 3 So here you've built this thing, Wikipedia, really entirely on trust. So

Speaker 3 how do you view trust? What is it about trust that you find so interesting?

Speaker 4 Yeah, well,

Speaker 4 you just need to look around at the world today. We've seen this really bad decline in trust in institutions, trust in journalism, trust in politics.

Speaker 4 trust in each other to some extent. And it's causing all kinds of problems.
People don't know what to believe or who to believe. And,

Speaker 4 you know, I think we need to get back to a culture where we can trust people.

Speaker 3 And is there evidence, though, to support that idea that we should be more trusting of people, that people are, in fact, trustworthy?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, I think we all get this in our day-to-day lives.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 a visual or an image that I use to talk about this is, you know, you imagine that you're asked to design a restaurant and you think, okay, right, I'm going to, it's not just designing just how the tablecloths look and things like that.

Speaker 4 You're going to really go out of the box and say, how would we build a restaurant? And you think, okay, well, in my restaurant, I'm going to serve steak because I like steak.

Speaker 4 And everybody's going to have a steak knife. And therefore, because they might stab each other, we better put a cage around every table.
But obviously, that's ridiculous.

Speaker 4 Like, we don't live our lives that way. We go into restaurants all the time and people are there with deadly weapons eating next to us.
And, you know, they're basically trustworthy. And,

Speaker 4 you know, we have friends, we have family, we have strangers we meet in an elevator. And basically, almost everybody's decent.
Decent human beings are all around us.

Speaker 4 And we know that and we really feel that. And yet, you know, somehow when we get out into social media or we're thinking sort of bigger picture, there's this

Speaker 4 toxicity that's crept in

Speaker 4 where you can really get the idea,

Speaker 4 and I'm sure we'll talk more about this, you can get the idea from social media that there's just, you know, the general public is just full of crazy, angry people.

Speaker 4 And that's just not really how it is.

Speaker 3 When you first founded Wikipedia several years ago, I remember people saying, well, you can't trust it.

Speaker 3 Nobody trusts Wikipedia. And yet when people have researched the accuracy of the articles on Wikipedia,

Speaker 3 it passes passes with flying colors, even though those articles are edited and written by volunteers. And really anybody can go in and edit an article on Wikipedia.
So how have you dealt with that?

Speaker 3 Explain that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, I think a big part of it is this is the lessons that I've learned through Wikipedia, the lessons of my career about trust.

Speaker 4 Like how do you build trust when people inherently start off saying, oh, what, this is crazy, like this idea,

Speaker 4 anybody can edit anything, that sounds completely insane. And why would I trust that? And so you think about, okay, but we know it's not insane.
What are the things we need to do to build trust?

Speaker 4 And so like, you know, one of the things that we need to do is around transparency. I mean, you know, you'll often see, if you read a lot of Wikipedia entries, you'll see.

Speaker 4 The neutrality of this article has been disputed right at the top of the page.

Speaker 4 And I always joke, you know, I wish the New York Times would print that sometimes, you know, to sell us, you know, like, we're going to run with this story, but we had a big fight in the newsroom.

Speaker 4 Like, not everybody's so sure about it, but we feel like it's important to tell you,

Speaker 4 you know, this reporting, but also that there may be some difficulty around it. I'd be like, that's great.
I would trust them more if they could be a little more transparent about that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 Well, since Wikipedia is trust in action, is it possible to explain how that works? I mean, maybe it's too complicated. Hopefully it's more simple, but can you explain how it works?

Speaker 4 It's both complicated and really simple. I mean, I do think it goes back to, you know, when we look at new edits coming in, even from people who aren't logged in.

Speaker 4 So you can still edit 99% of Wikipedia without even logging in or having an account, and it goes live immediately. I can't.

Speaker 3 Look at those edits. Wait, I can?

Speaker 4 Yeah, you can. Right now, you can go to almost any article on Wikipedia, not the most famous ones, obviously, and not ones that have had trouble.

Speaker 4 But, you know, broadly, pick something, you know, unknown.

Speaker 4 And then when we look at those edits that are coming in, what we find is, although they're not as good of a quality as that of really experienced Wikipedians who've been doing it for years and who understand all of the parameters and so forth, but they're still on net positive.

Speaker 4 Like most people, they just come and they just maybe fix a spelling error or they add some fact or they just put a link at the bottom to something they think is important.

Speaker 4 And on average, people are doing it. So there's that experience we have to say, well, actually, it does work.
So that part is simple, but then the more complicated bit, right? So we have,

Speaker 4 you know, the regular users of the website have a lot of tools to be able to monitor things.

Speaker 4 So anything you've edited in the past, you get a notification if you want to when you log in to say, oh, here's the things you're watching and here's something changed. So you can keep an eye on it.

Speaker 4 We have admins who are are elected by the community and you know they can temporarily block people or they can lock pages if there's a big fight or or some kind of problem and so those are the kinds of things that we do to try to say okay right we are going to deal with that less less than one percent of people who come in and they're they're being annoying or they're you know not doing what they're supposed to But even there, you know, usually what we do is we see,

Speaker 4 you know, there's some great stories of Wikipedians, like really great, wonderful people who they started editing Wikipedia when they were very young by vandalizing a page because they couldn't believe they could do it.

Speaker 4 And then somebody says to them, hey, you know, like, yeah, don't do that. That's not really what we're doing here.
We're trying to make an encyclopedia. And then people are like, oh, okay, right.

Speaker 3 Well.

Speaker 4 Great.

Speaker 4 I didn't realize like this is actually nice people and I should be a nice person too. And so it's building that culture is a big part of how it, how it all works.
But it's very human.

Speaker 4 It's really, people get to know each other. There's a lot of friendships.

Speaker 4 There's a lot of people who are, you know, you might edit, maybe your favorite subject is trains, because there are trained people who are obsessed with trains.

Speaker 4 And they may go and edit the history of various locomotive engines from the 1930s. And through Wikipedia, they get to meet somebody else who, believe it or not, is interested in the same thing.

Speaker 4 And so they make friendships. They're like, oh, wow, look, I didn't know anybody was as obsessed with this this as I am.
So yeah, great. We can work together.

Speaker 3 So wait a minute. So somebody goes on Wikipedia and tries to vandalize or tries to screw up an entry.

Speaker 3 You contact them and go, hey, knock it off. We're trying to all trying to get along here.

Speaker 3 Did I hear you correctly? You do that? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, hopefully. I mean, you know, it depends on the situation, and it's very human.
It's admins doing this. And they normally will post a warning on the talk page before they block you forever.

Speaker 4 It sort of depends on what you do. Like if you've done something minor, you're more likely to get that.
If you went around in quick succession, like

Speaker 4 putting really vile stuff on 10 pages in a row, they're probably just going to block you first and just say, you know, knock it off. Like that's ridiculous.

Speaker 4 But usually that first block is just for a short period of time and you do get a message saying, hey, you've been blocked.

Speaker 4 uh for 24 hours you know knock it off you can get permanently banned of course but by and large, most people, they get blocked once and they're like, all right, well, that wasn't that exciting.

Speaker 4 So they stop.

Speaker 3 And I think it's, love that.

Speaker 4 I think it's really important to understand,

Speaker 4 like, one of the problems we have with almost every social media platform these days is that far from getting blocked, if you go on and you start being rude and abusive, you get a lot of attention.

Speaker 4 You either get attention because, well, people can't help but respond back by by yelling back at you. And then, you know, that's a waste of everybody's time, but it's very human.

Speaker 4 But also, maybe the algorithm notices you and says, ah, this person's getting a lot of engagement. There's a lot of, you know, people are staying on the site longer in order to talk to this person.

Speaker 4 So we're going to show more of their content to more people. And of course, that means toxic content,

Speaker 4 you know, it just goes viral sometimes. And that's not helpful.

Speaker 3 I'm speaking with Jimmy Wales. We're talking about trust.
He is the founder of of Wikipedia and author of the book The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last.

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Speaker 3 So, Jimmy, I mean, this is a whole business. And just listening to you talk, it explains why you wrote a book about trust because your whole business is built on trusting people.

Speaker 3 And I can imagine whenever, I don't recall when you started Wikipedia, but if you sat around the table with people and said, okay, I got this idea.

Speaker 3 We're going to start this thing that became Wikipedia. I would imagine everyone would say, well, that is never going to work because people will have agendas and this will not be neutral at all.

Speaker 3 And this will be,

Speaker 3 and would just

Speaker 3 destroy this idea. I don't know how it survived that if it did happen.

Speaker 4 People do wonder about that and they say that. I mean, it turns out

Speaker 4 there are a lot of people in the world who actually...

Speaker 4 are very happy to see ideas presented in a clear and neutral way. Even if they agree with one side or the other, they say, well, look,

Speaker 4 really be fair, we need to explain very well, like, what's the fight about? What's the argument?

Speaker 4 My favorite type of example is to imagine a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist.

Speaker 4 And they could work together on the article abortion, as long as they're kind and thoughtful, which is what I specified, because they'll both say, okay, right.

Speaker 4 The Catholic priest will say, look, I understand Wikipedia can't say, you know, abortion is a sin.

Speaker 4 It can't sort of just blindly put forward the Catholic Church point of view, but it can say the Catholic Church point of view is this, and the Pope has said that, and the argument is this, and critics have responded thus and such, and so on.

Speaker 4 And that's really what you want out of an encyclopedia. You really want to get the whole story.
You want neutrality, and that's another big piece of

Speaker 4 how we think about building trust.

Speaker 3 And you make your money from donations, correct?

Speaker 4 Yes, Yeah. So Wikipedia is a charity.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the charity I set up that owns and operates Wikipedia. And we're funded

Speaker 4 very, very much by the small donors. So, you know, the people who are giving their 20 bucks once a year, they see the notice and they go, oh, yeah, right, Wikipedia.
I love Wikipedia.

Speaker 4 I'm going to chip in my 20 bucks.

Speaker 4 And I think that's really important, that we're not funded by governments. We're not funded by a handful of billionaires because it gives us intellectual independence.

Speaker 4 You know, we're able to say, you know, the community can say, oh, we can write the truth. We can do what we need to do without worrying about if we're going to offend a donor.

Speaker 3 So, Jimmy, I'm sure everyone listening. has heard of Wikipedia, has read articles on Wikipedia, has referenced Wikipedia.
But I'm curious,

Speaker 3 exactly how many people actually use Wikipedia?

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 in a month's time, we see about 2 billion devices access Wikipedia. Now, we don't do a lot of tracking, so

Speaker 4 we can't link up. If you're on your phone or you're on your laptop, we don't know you're the same person, so we can't really tell.

Speaker 4 But, you know. 2 billion devices, so lots of people over the course of a month would see Wikipedia from two devices.
Some people would see it only from one. Some people only have one device.

Speaker 4 So I'd say probably a billion and a half people every month probably see Wikipedia.

Speaker 3 That's a lot of people.

Speaker 4 It is a lot of people.

Speaker 4 And it's in so many languages as well. You know, we're, we're all around the world and

Speaker 4 so many countries, so many languages. And that adds a lot of richness to the, to the whole.
you know, the whole community.

Speaker 3 And so how does the language thing work? Do all Wikipedia articles say start in English and then they get translated? Or each language has its own database of articles or what?

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, each language is written separately. So, you know, if you look at Japanese Wikipedia, it's and who edits it.

Speaker 4 It's 99% of the people or something like that are in Japan and they're Japanese people editing Japanese Wikipedia. And maybe, yeah, sometimes people translate.

Speaker 4 Actually, I think there's as much translation into English as out of English

Speaker 4 because, you know, oftentimes people

Speaker 4 have two languages. And if you have two languages, probably your second language is English because it's the most popular second language in the world.
And so maybe you're writing about your,

Speaker 4 you know, local village in Poland and you think, oh, yeah, well, I've just written this in Polish. I can see they don't have it in English.
I'll go and add something there.

Speaker 4 And, you know, people sometimes are a little shy about that because they think, oh, my English isn't so good. But these days, machine translation is getting better.

Speaker 4 Also, the communities do know each other a bit. And they say, oh, yeah, come.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 We're the English language Polish wiki project.

Speaker 4 And we want to help Polish people sort of share knowledge about Poland because probably it's people who are, you know, living abroad and are Polish themselves and so on and so forth.

Speaker 4 So that kind of collaboration happens, but there really are independent communities.

Speaker 3 And are you concerned at all that

Speaker 3 AI will displace some of the people who use Wikipedia? you know, rather than look at the Wikipedia article about Paris, I can ask ChatGPT exactly what I want to know about Paris. So maybe I'll,

Speaker 3 does that concern you?

Speaker 4 Well, it doesn't concern us that much. And at least so far, we haven't seen any really material impact on our traffic from the rise of AI.

Speaker 4 There was a study showing that, you know how when you search in Google these days, you often get an AI summary at the top. Right.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 so the study said that for traditional search results, Wikipedia is in the top 10 3% of the time. But in AI summaries, Wikipedia is cited 6% of the time.

Speaker 4 So we get cited a lot more, but people click through a lot less because, as you say, maybe they just got the answer they were looking for.

Speaker 4 You know, you used to type sitting at home, having dinner with your family or friend, and you say, oh, how old is Tom Cruise anyway?

Speaker 4 I don't know, let's check. And you Google, how old is Tom Cruise? And back in the olden days, 10 years ago, the olden days, Google didn't know.
Google had no idea how old Tom Cruise was.

Speaker 4 They had just linked to Wikipedia. Now Google knows.
Google just tells you, but it also gives you the source. So you might not click through or you might get tempted to click through.

Speaker 4 So we haven't seen much impact on our traffic. And then again, there's this question of trust.
You know, when we think about what do you trust, I mean, I find

Speaker 4 those

Speaker 4 Google AI summaries in particular often quite confused. I think part of that is because

Speaker 4 when you're searching, you just type two or three keywords, so it doesn't really know what you're trying to ask. And so sometimes it just answers hilariously.

Speaker 3 Well, I love your story because, you know, here's Wikipedia, which is

Speaker 3 really

Speaker 3 the foundation of it is people writing articles and editing articles. It's very not high-tech in that regard, like AI is,

Speaker 3 but yet people love it. I mean, people truly,

Speaker 3 as evidenced by the numbers you just gave, people still love it and use it. And I know school teachers hate it in some ways because they're afraid kids will rip it off and that'll be their essay.

Speaker 4 I love to go out and talk to young people. at schools and so on.
And one of the things I always say to young people is, you might think you could just copy from Wikipedia, but guess what?

Speaker 4 Your teachers also read Wikipedia. So that isn't going to work.

Speaker 3 Well, this is such an interesting framework to use to talk about trust because here you've got this business that really is built on trust. The foundation of Wikipedia is trust.

Speaker 3 We've got to trust that it's accurate. And you've got to trust as the founder of Wikipedia, you have to trust that the people editing the articles are being accurate.
And it all seems to work.

Speaker 3 I've been talking with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and author of the book, The Seven Rules of Trust, a Blueprint for Building Things That Last.

Speaker 3 And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Jimmy, thank you for being here.

Speaker 4 Yeah, thank you.

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Speaker 3 What are you you afraid of?

Speaker 3 These days, it feels like fear is everywhere. In the news, on social media, in the way we talk about the world.
We're told to be afraid of crime, disease, politics, technology, even each other.

Speaker 3 But is the world really more dangerous than it used to be? Or have we simply learned to feel more afraid? And what would happen if we could ease some of that fear and see things more clearly?

Speaker 3 My guest, Ruth DeFoster, is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, and she's author of the book, The Fear Not, How Science, History, and Culture Shape Our Fears and How to Get Unstuck.

Speaker 3 Hi, Ruth. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 2 Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 3 So what exactly is fear? Everyone's experienced fear, but does science have some sort of definition or explanation as to what happens when we're fearful?

Speaker 2 Not really. I think fear is a social construct to a large degree.
And so for that reason, it's kind of hard to nail down a precise definition.

Speaker 2 But it is interesting to look to the difference of the fears that we are born with versus the fears that we develop over the course of our lives.

Speaker 3 And the fears that we're born with are which?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it may surprise you. It surprised me to learn that humans are only born with two innate fears, fear of loud sounds and fear of falling.

Speaker 2 So that kind of makes sense on an evolutionary level because, you know, falling can harm or kill you and loud noises can predict danger.

Speaker 2 But those innate fears are really embedded in our biology as a means to protect us.

Speaker 2 And interestingly, if you look to either people or certain types of animals who are unable to feel fear, we can see how that is really harmful to those people and to those animals.

Speaker 2 So for example, people who suffer from Urbach Vita disease, which renders humans incapable of feeling fear. And one of the most famous patients with this disease is called SM.

Speaker 2 She's a married mother of three. She's been unable to feel fear for three decades.
And researchers and scientists have tried almost everything to make her feel fear.

Speaker 2 They've put tarantulas on her, they've taken her to haunted houses, they've shown her horror movies, they've even briefly suffocated her with carbon dioxide, all in the name of science.

Speaker 2 But she cannot feel fear because of this disease. And while this might sound like an evolutionary boon, it actually her lack of a fear response has put her in danger many times throughout her life.

Speaker 2 So for example, once she was held up at gunpoint, and because she can't feel fear, she just laughed at her attacker. Oh my gosh.
And so, yeah, so fear exists on a continuum.

Speaker 2 If you have too little fear caused by diseases like Urbag Vita disease, or there are some prey animals like mice, if they have toxoplasmosis, they completely lose their ability to fear predators.

Speaker 2 And obviously that can be deadly. But we also argue that all-consuming fear can be debilitating as well.

Speaker 2 And so we try to strike the right balance, recognizing and identifying legitimate fears while demystifying the fears that have been overblown or sensationalized.

Speaker 3 You would think that those creatures who have no fear, evolution would have taken care of them because how could they survive very long if they have fear of nothing?

Speaker 2 And it does. Yeah.
So what we're kind of talking about there is rodents. So certain rodents, if they're exposed to toxoplasmosis, they lose the ability to fear predators.

Speaker 2 And this is also the reason why women women are asked not to change litter boxes during pregnancy. It's to avoid being exposed to

Speaker 2 that same disease.

Speaker 3 If you're one of those people who doesn't have fear, what do you have?

Speaker 3 In other words, when you are confronted with a fearful situation in most people's eyes, is there a different reaction or is there no reaction?

Speaker 2 Interestingly, in the scientific literature around the patient SM, who I mentioned before, if you look to the data and the write-ups of all the studies that have been done around her and her experiences, they draw a distinction between what they call fear and panic.

Speaker 2 So she does occasionally panic. She does occasionally experience like that kind of pressing concern.

Speaker 2 But the scientists who have been studying this disease have made a distinction between momentary panic and that sort of deep-seated psychological fear that most human beings are capable of experiencing.

Speaker 3 And all the other fears are all basically learned fears. We learn to be afraid afraid of things.

Speaker 2 Correct. Every other fear that we have is something that we learn.
It is not innate. It is socially constructed by our lived experiences.

Speaker 3 And my sense is that we live in a more fearful world today than in the past. Certainly more fearful than my childhood.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I would agree with that.

Speaker 2 I think we're already kind of seeing the ways in which the overblown sensational fears have really poisoned our political and cultural discourse, from the really cruel and toxic way that we talk about immigration to the way that we glamorize and sensationalize serial killers and murderers in the true crime pop culture community.

Speaker 2 And I mean, I hate to say it realistically, I don't see this changing anytime soon because the system, the algorithmic system, especially on social media, is really stacked against any kind of large-scale change.

Speaker 2 And that's because most of our news and information now is drawn from the algorithmic wild west of social media.

Speaker 2 And companies that own social media platforms like ByteDance, which owns TikTok, and Meta, which owns Instagram, they know that outrage is one of the best mechanisms for continued engagement on these platforms.

Speaker 2 And thus, these sites

Speaker 2 devolve very quickly into rage bait and incentivize negativity. And I think you can really see this in the current tenor of political discourse in this country.

Speaker 2 Civil discourse is truly becoming a thing of the past, and that is largely because of cultural fears.

Speaker 3 So, one of the things that seems pretty apparent and pretty universal is the more you're exposed to something fearful, even though you're not in harm's way, the more fearful you become of it.

Speaker 3 As you just said, if you listen to a lot of true crime podcasts or watch a lot of scary movies or read about serial killers,

Speaker 3 you think those are a bigger deal in life than they probably are.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's actually a term in the literature for this.
There's a gentleman named George Gerbner, and he coined the term mean world syndrome. And this is basically

Speaker 2 it's a cognitive bias where people who have, especially who have really heavy media diets of violent or frightening media, they go on to then perceive the world as being considerably more dangerous than it is.

Speaker 2 And we can certainly see this in my area of expertise, which is media coverage of terrorism.

Speaker 2 I mean, terrorism, especially international terrorism, is a problem so minuscule that it statistically approaches zero.

Speaker 2 You are literally more likely to be killed by your lawnmower than an international terrorist.

Speaker 2 But the degree of concern and cultural fear and pop culture that we've built up around this sort of trendy cultural fear of international terror is truly overblown relative to the actual risk that it poses.

Speaker 2 And I would argue that's largely a function of our media diets and the pop culture that we consume, which is, especially in the post-September 11 years, has been really focused on this looming external threat of international terror.

Speaker 3 Aaron Ross Powell: Well, the example that's often cited, especially after 9-11,

Speaker 3 is air travel versus car travel. Air travel took a real dip and people were driving in their cars, and you're much more likely to die in a car crash than you are on an airplane.

Speaker 3 But you're much more likely to survive a car crash than you are to survive an airplane crash.

Speaker 2 Yes. And I think there's also something to be said psychologically for the locus of control.
In a car, you feel more in control even if that control or that feeling of control is misplaced.

Speaker 2 In an airplane, right, you're in a metal tube with dozens of other people and you're just sitting there.

Speaker 2 So I think that there's probably psychologically something going on with like the ability to sort of have personal agency in that situation. But yeah, you're right.

Speaker 2 It is considerably more dangerous to travel by car than it is to travel by plane.

Speaker 3 One fear that comes up every year is this idea that you have to screen your kid's Halloween candy because someone may have put a razor blade in it or poison in it.

Speaker 3 And yet when you look at the facts, when you search for this, it pretty much never, ever happens. There have been a couple of incidents.

Speaker 3 There have been more pranks than there were deliberate attempts to kill people.

Speaker 3 And there was that one case of the father who actually did kill his son by poisoning his Halloween candy back in the 70s.

Speaker 3 But in terms of the neighbor waking up one morning and deciding to poison all the neighborhood kids with their Halloween candy, it just never happens.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, compared to other cultural trendy fears that focus on children, like for example, like fears of child abuse or like QAnon or the satanic panic, those fears at least have a kernel of truth.

Speaker 2 I mean, childhood sex abuse absolutely is a real problem, but it is not committed by strangers. It is almost always committed by people who are in the child's life.

Speaker 2 So that almost makes like a little bit of intuitive sense, but but this one is truly perplexing.

Speaker 3 You said a moment ago that

Speaker 3 some of these fears kind of recycle generation to generation. What's an example of that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so going back to, like, it's easy to look at dramatic historical examples of mass hysteria like the Salem witch trials as something that we've evolved from, but we really, really haven't.

Speaker 2 I mean, in some ways, we certainly have evolved since the 17th century, but the echoes of that mass hysteria still trickle down into the present. It trickles into the satanic panic.

Speaker 2 There are still Americans in jail today on trumped-up charges of satanic rituals in American preschools.

Speaker 2 And many of the court cases that accompanied the panic of the 1980s, they bear a striking similarity to the sensational trials of the Salem era. And that's just one example.

Speaker 2 In the 19th century, there were several cyclical fears of being buried alive. That was really interesting.

Speaker 2 So there were all of this pop culture and novels and plays about this fear of being buried alive, and then that faded away.

Speaker 2 And then today we have, you know, more cyclical fears of things like serial killers. But another fear that's been cyclical that I think is really, really harmful is fear of vaccination.

Speaker 2 That's not new. That goes back hundreds of years.
There have been concerns about the safety of vaccination or as it was initially called variolation when it first came out.

Speaker 2 But from a public health perspective, Rising childhood fears of vaccination have been absolutely catastrophic in the 21st century.

Speaker 2 My youngest two children are in middle school, and they have already lived through three local measles outbreaks, including one that is spreading right now.

Speaker 2 And that's not a sentence that I should be uttering in the 21st century because we have the medical technology. We have the scientific consensus to enact an effective childhood vaccination program.

Speaker 2 But instead,

Speaker 2 Many Americans are afraid of vaccination. They don't plan to fully vaccinate their children.

Speaker 2 And now we have a 20-point gap between the amount of vaccination that we need for herd immunity against measles and the number of Americans who are actually planning on fully vaccinating their children, which is only about three-quarters.

Speaker 3 The idea of being afraid often seems to be focused around children.

Speaker 3 That I'm not afraid for me, I'm afraid for my kids.

Speaker 3 Does that kind of run through history?

Speaker 3 That it's not me.

Speaker 3 We have to save the kids.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's been a really common through line throughout history. And that's also often a common scapegoat when folks are trying to trample free speech, right? It's about protecting the children.

Speaker 2 It's not about trampling free speech. There's, of course, a natural fear that every society has for their young.

Speaker 2 And we've found that almost all of the cultural fears that have sort of evolved in the early years, they are often based around trying to protect and serve the most vulnerable among us.

Speaker 2 But we do have to be really careful of not then using that as a rhetorical or political cudgel to silence independent thought.

Speaker 3 One word that gets people's attention, that people are afraid of, is toxic or toxins. And you hear this a lot with supplements and things.

Speaker 3 They'll get rid of the toxins in your body. And nobody wants toxins.
And

Speaker 3 yet nobody's really sure what it means. Because when you ask people, well, what toxins does it get rid of?

Speaker 3 They don't really know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's my co-author, Tasha, did a lot of work around

Speaker 2 over-the-counter drugs and supplements for that reason.

Speaker 2 And you're right, that word toxin is a frequently touted marketing term, but it really is almost meaningless, sort of in the clinical literature, the way that it's being used by vitamin and supplement industries.

Speaker 2 Especially because you already have, you know, systems in your body, your kidney, your liver, that will filter out toxins from your body.

Speaker 2 And any product that is claiming that you need it to flush toxins is, it's not true. But what we have in the United States is a uniquely unregulated vitamin and supplement industry.

Speaker 2 They can claim almost anything they want without legal repercussions.

Speaker 2 And so when it comes to vitamins and supplements, you need to be really careful and you need to consult with a medical doctor before you add anything to your regimen.

Speaker 3 Another thing people have learned to become afraid of, scared of,

Speaker 3 are toxins in like cleaning supplies, household products, that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 And, you know, so we're told you got to get rid of all that and bring in all natural, organic, whatever, because those other products under your sink are dangerous.

Speaker 2 And again, that goes back to fears for children, right? I mean, this goes back to the idea that we are somehow unwittingly exposing our kids to something that might be harmful to them.

Speaker 2 And I think that that inclination is well placed. You know, there's nothing wrong with wanting to care for your children to create a safe and welcoming environment for them.

Speaker 2 But when it can become all-consuming to the degree that, for example, orthorexia is an eating disorder that consumes some people who are so obsessed with only eating healthy that it actually becomes a problem for them.

Speaker 2 It becomes very limiting and it actually becomes like a clinical disease.

Speaker 2 And so there's always just this middle ground to be had between trying to do what's right and what's thoughtful and what's environmentally conscious, but not letting it become so all-consuming that it actually becomes like a clinical psychological problem.

Speaker 3 If you're old enough to remember, you can feel today, you can just feel it in the air. There is a societal fear that didn't used to be.

Speaker 3 That is this fear of like stranger danger, that your kids are just walking potential victims of kidnappers, that you've got to keep your eye on them. You can't let them go out by themselves.

Speaker 3 And yet the evidence is, as I understand it, that we live in a time now that is safer than ever and that those things are even less likely to happen today than before.

Speaker 3 But boy, the pressure to keep your eye on your kids because you just never know what could happen is pretty strong.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that is absolutely true. By almost any metric, we live in an unprecedented era of safety and security.
Asterisk, if you're in the United States, that's not true for everyone.

Speaker 2 But for those of us who are in the United States and who are in the Western world, we're doing really well. Teen pregnancy is plummeting in the United States.
Violent crime is down.

Speaker 2 Serial killers are significantly less active than they were in the 1970s and the 1980s. I mean, across almost every metric, we're doing better.

Speaker 3 And yet, this idea that kids can't go outside and play by themselves because it's so dangerous is very prevalent. And it can't be good for kids, I would imagine.

Speaker 2 It's not good for children, actually, to not have unsupervised play. There's an interesting study that was a longitudinal study.

Speaker 2 It looked at children in the 1970s versus children in the 19 or in the 2000s, and it was looking at the amount of space that those children had to roam unsupervised.

Speaker 2 In the 1970s, that was basically like half of their town. They could just come back on your bike when it's dinner time.

Speaker 2 By the 2000s, it was their backyard. That's it.

Speaker 2 And so it's more, we're keeping kids on a shorter and shorter leash, but ironically, the world is a safer place for them than it's ever been before.

Speaker 2 And so I think it's really important to give kids a little bit of space to go and explore. I let my kids explore my neighborhood and come back.

Speaker 2 I know where they, you know, I know generally where they are and they come back at dinner and they're fine.

Speaker 3 It's good for them. And so where did that come from? Where did a fear based on absolutely incorrect facts take such hold?

Speaker 2 Well, I think this might come back to just trends in parenting.

Speaker 2 So a lot of the sort of latchkey kids of the the Gen X generation, they attributed a lot of their sort of concerns and problems with adult in adulthood to the fact that they felt that they had been neglected as children.

Speaker 2 And I think that they've often sort of over-corrected toward what's called snowplow parenting.

Speaker 2 So from the latchkey generation, which was much more hands-off, they sort of over-corrected to try to clear every obstacle out of their kids' way.

Speaker 2 And that has its own, you know, that has its own pitfalls. So again, it just comes down to like striking that happy middle balance.

Speaker 3 Well, I think it's great to have these conversations because it kind of prompts you to think about your own fears. And what are you afraid of? And should you really be that afraid of this?

Speaker 3 And I appreciate the conversation. Ruth DeFoster has been my guest.
She's an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota. And she's author of the book, The Fear Knot.

Speaker 3 How Science, History, and Culture Shape Our Fears and How to Get Unstuck. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.
Ruth, thanks so much. I appreciate you being here.

Speaker 2 Thanks. Bye.

Speaker 3 A lot of men wish they could be taller, but unfortunately, there's not much you can do about that. However, there are some things you can do to make yourself look taller, or at least not look shorter.

Speaker 3 First of all, don't wear short-sleeve shirts because much of what you wear creates an optical illusion.

Speaker 3 And one of the weirder ones is that short sleeves make your arms look shorter and if your arms look shorter so will the rest of you. Keep accessories simple.

Speaker 3 In order to appear taller, you want the eyes of whoever's looking at you to sweep upward.

Speaker 3 The more someone's eyes sweep upward, the taller they'll register whatever it is they're looking at, including you.

Speaker 3 To maintain that upward sweep, avoid anything that will draw their attention below your your chest. Steer clear of flashy shoes, flashy watches, and big belt buckles.

Speaker 3 Make sure your shirt doesn't go lower than your hip bone. If you're short and wearing a button-down shirt, you should be tucking it in most of the time.

Speaker 3 But if you absolutely have to untuck it or you're wearing a shirt designed to be worn untucked like a t-shirt, just make sure the hem of the shirt doesn't go past your hip bone.

Speaker 3 Anything longer than that swallows you up and makes your legs look stubby.

Speaker 3 And you'll want to wear your pants at your natural waistline in order to maximize your leg line. The appearance of longer legs is a major factor in looking taller.

Speaker 3 And that is something you should know. You might be surprised to know how much ratings and reviews help this podcast.

Speaker 3 Well, they help every podcast, but mostly I'm concerned about the ratings and reviews for this podcast, which is why I'm asking you to please, on whatever platform you're listening on, to leave a rating and review.

Speaker 3 Hopefully, it's five stars. I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

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Speaker 7 Oh, the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place, or the time when Jane Austen wrote her books.

Speaker 7 But the Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history.

Speaker 7 And on the Vulgar History podcast, we're going to be looking at the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal of the Regency era.

Speaker 7 Vulgar History is a women's history podcast, and our Regency Era series will be focusing on the most rebellious women of this time.

Speaker 7 That includes Jane Austen herself, who is maybe more radical than you might have thought.

Speaker 7 We'll also be talking about queer icons like Anne Lister, scientists like Mary Anning and Ada Lovelace, as well as other scandalous actresses, royal mistresses, rebellious princesses, and other lesser-known figures who made history happen in England in the Regency era.

Speaker 5 Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get podcasts.