81% of children took the wrong lesson from a cartoon, and being told the moral worked worse than being asked to explain it

and her provocative paper was called explanation as orgasm. So the aha is kind of like a bribe to keep us going to dig deeper and understand realizing that you don't understand something that you thought you understood that is incredibly important for learning because now you know which questions to ask getting lots of explanations in a relatively effortless and seamless way can be very satisfying. I think it's going to mean that you're learning less. Don't steal the insight from the student. But am I seriously concerned as a parent, a human, and a college professor about some of the current tools that are available and some of the ways that people are currently using them?

Yes, I am very concerned about that. The Nick, my guest today is Tanya Lmbroso, a professor of psychology at Princeton. She spent 25 years studying one question, why humans ask why. And most of the research you're going to hear about today came out of her own lab. Her new book is Why We Ask Why: The Science of Explanation and The Human Drive to Understand. It's coming out October 6th. Here's what made me want this conversation. When you explain something to a kid, they can repeat it back to you. When your kid explains it to you, they can actually use it. And every one of us is now carrying a device in our pocket that is very happy to do the explaining for all of us.

Tanya, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So, the book opens at 3 in the morning. You're woken up by giggling and the clink of fake china and then you go out to the living room. What did you find there? Well, I think it's important to say it was the middle of the night. It was dark. My mother was visiting from Southern California. I lived in the Bay Area at the time. And what I found was my toddler and my mother having a tea party there in the middle of the night in the dark whispering to each other. And um let's let's just keep keep running with the story. Let's just dig in because I love I love this story.

Like it really it it captured my heart right right at the outset. So for me, this was really puzzling. this called out for explanation. It was not at all surprising to me that my toddler would be trying to get away with a middle- of the night tea party. That was very much in character for her, but it was deeply surprising that my mother would be going along with this, right? My mother's very sensible. She's, you know, come comes to help with the kids, knows sleep is very important. I would expect her to want to be asleep herself in the middle of the night. Uh, and so when I came across this and discovered not just that my toddler was up, but that they were seemingly playing together, you know, without my mother trying to get her back to bed, it was really, really puzzling.

And it was just one of these experiences that I think we we all have pretty routinely of feeling like something is really demanding an explanation, right? We really want to know why, how how could this have come about? Yeah. One, and it sounds like you had kind of two lines of thought. There's like the the scientist part of it and the mom part of it. What what's going on in your head in that moment? Yeah, that's right. So, part of that was about when I got the answer. Right. So, after interrogating all of the parties that were involved in this u middle of the night tea party, what I discovered had happened is that basically my uh my toddler had woken up, decided to go wake up my mom because she was excited that her grandmother was visiting.

And the relevant things to know about my grandmother are sorry, my mother, the the grandmother in the story. Um, she really doesn't like her reading glasses. You know, she really needs reading glasses to see what time it is on a clock, but she really doesn't like to wear her reading glasses. And so when my toddler went to wake her up and said, you know, it's time to get up, come play with me, uh, my mother went along with it. And it wasn't that strange that it was dark because this was, you know, winter and in the early morning it was actually in fact dark that time of year. So my mother thought she was just getting up at a normal time doing her grandmotherly duty, looking after the toddler uh and so on.

And so the the mom part of my brain uh was not totally satisfied because even if there was a good explanation for how this happened, my toddler was still going to be really grumpy all day, right? There was just no getting around that part. And it wasn't fair to my mom that her asleep got disrupted. But the scientist part of me kind of had this very satisfying aha because these different pieces of information that I gathered made sense of the event. I could understand exactly why it unfolded exactly how it had. And they were all pieces of information that fit in with my prior beliefs about the world.

It made perfect sense that my mom had not consulted the clock when she was woken up because I know she doesn't like her reading glasses. And it made perfect sense to me that uh my toddler, given her temperament and her proclivities, would have decided that it was reasonable to wake up my mother at this time and so on. Uh and so that combination of having something be initially very surprising but then to be able to accommodate it in a simple way in the context of the beliefs I already had is is the kind of experience I think we all dream about as scientists who are trying to explain novel phenomena, novel observations and so on.

Well, sure. And and your four-year-old uh had chosen to dabble in some skepticism here um which I really liked. Um, how could she know the alarm clock was was working? Um, does anyone really know what time it is? What is time? Um, and yeah, was what was going on in her in her head? Honestly, I think that was we might call wishful thinking or motivated reasoning, right? I think she was I think what was really going on is that she was very motivated to get out of bed even though uh you know her clock was perhaps indicating that it wasn't time to get up. Uh and you know when you're when you're very motivated to arrive at a particular conclusion you can use lots of psychological tricks to try to cast doubt on the conclusion you want to avoid.

And so I will be honest, I don't know exactly what was going on in her head during that episode, but that was my attempt to reconstruct the the kind of chain of thought I can imagine that she would have engaged in. Well, let's and let's dig into that explanations and uh asking why a little bit deeper. So, there's another uh part that that grabbed me with a reporter asks Willie Sutton um and I I mean I was familiar with this already. I love I love this quote um why he robs banks and he says because that's where the money is. Uh but there's a part in his memoir that you bring into it. Um why did I rob banks?

Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank robbing it than any other time in my life. So both these statements are true. But what's the what's the difference between them? So, I use the Willie Sutton example, which which I also love to make a philosophical point about explanation, uh, which is that when you ask a why question, you're often asking about why one thing happened rather than another thing. And so, there is an implicit or sometimes explicit contrast that you have in mind. So, when this reporter allegedly asked Willie Sutton why he robs banks, presumably what they had in mind was why do you rob banks rather than being a law-abiding citizen like the rest of us, right?

So, even though it wasn't in the question, the sort of implicit contrast was not robbing. And what Willie Sutton instead answered, why does he rob banks? Because that's where the money is, he kind of answered a different question, right? He answered, "Why do you rob banks rather than robbing libraries, rather than robbing candy stores, rather than, you know, robbing something else?" Um, and so even though when we ask each other questions, we typically don't specify all of these sort of alternatives we have in mind, what we're very good at is using context, our prior beliefs, our expectations, and so on to figure out what it is somebody is really asking and then giving an answer that addresses what it is that actually answers in the sense of making a difference to what they're trying to explain versus the contrast that perhaps they didn't specify.

Yeah. Well, and I think when we when we're getting into the to the weeds with some of this stuff, it it reminds me of David Foster Wallace's uh this is water with the the two fish and they meet the older fish and the older fish says uh how's the water boys and then swims off. Um, and then they look at each other and they say, "What's water?" And, and because I think when we're talking about explanations and why we ask why. I mean, that's the water. It's so ingrained into our nature that we don't stop to think about what it what it is and why it matters and why bringing language to it and awareness to it is actually really important and useful in our everyday lives.

So, I want to I just want to push on that just a little bit to figure out the importance in our daily lives of of unpacking why do we ask so many why questions. Yeah, I think I think that's a great observation and I think it's actually true of a lot of our most basic psychological phenomena, right? So, if you think about a process like perception, we have the experience of, you know, we just look around and it's kind of effortless that we make sense of our environment. that we've discovered both through psychology and through trying to build artificial intelligence systems that actually that's a really hard problem.

Um same with language, you know, we take it for granted that we can open our mouths and express something that we want to communicate to somebody and understand language back and so on. So I think our explanatory processes are like those other psychological mechanisms. We sort of take them for granted because they operate all the time throughout our daily lives. there is the uh questions we ask ourselves, the questions we ask others, the way we evaluate other people's explanations and so on. And so I think one of the things that I try to draw attention to in the book is that there's actually a lot of sophisticated choices that go into all of the steps of that process that we often don't realize because we do it so seamlessly and effortlessly all the time.

So for example, there's a question of what do you bother to seek an explanation for? Right? We're not indiscriminate in what we're curious about. We're actually extremely selective. We're only curious about some things and not others. We ask some why questions and not others. So already just what you bother to ask is reflecting the outcome of sophisticated cognitive computations. Then there's which kinds of explanations you're going to consider when you get an explanation, how you're going to evaluate it, what's going to happen next. Are you going to ask a follow-up question? Are you going to get more evidence?

Are you going to believe it? Are you going to reject it? Right? So each of these steps in the explanatory process is actually very complicated, very nuanced, and reveals a lot about the kinds of creatures we are and has a lot of consequences for whether or not you're going to end up learning, not learning, persuading, not persuading, and so on. Yeah, it reminds me of uh thinking fast and thinking slow where this deep tomb of a book um looking into basic psychological uh the the operating system um that that all of us use and yet it is just chock full of insights into how our thinking actually works um on a lot of lines where it things that we normally just think of as as automatic and don't take the time to think through.

Um maybe to to get to the nuance here of what we're talking about the um you've got the friend who gets hit in the face by a bat in a cave in Kentucky. Uh no, sorry, in Tennessee. Tennessee. Um take me through that story and the and the reasoning process that follows. Yeah, absolutely. So this is this is a true story of a philosophy professor named Georgie Gardner. She had this experience where she was hit by a bat while she was going for a walk in a cave. Uh, and she, you know, she did a little bit of research about whether or not it seemed like maybe it was a rabies exposure, maybe she should get the rabies vaccine, but she talked to some people.

She wasn't too concerned about it. It didn't seem like it was really a dangerous situation that she had been in. But about a week after this event, she woke up with a series of strange symptoms. So she woke up and her sort of her tongue felt kind of weird. It was sort of numb and she sort of had this general malaise like maybe she was getting sick and she had a scratchy throat and then she looked in the mirror and on the cheek where the uh bat had brushed her there were sort of these like like an infected scratcher bite. There were these dots of pus and so this was kind of alarming, right? This is kind of worrisome.

Um some of the early symptoms of rabies are consistent with these kinds of symptoms sort of like uh sort of early flu-l like symptoms having s you know sort of unusual sensations at the location of the bite or the scratch and so on. Um and so it seemed possible that these four symptoms that she had could all be explained by the hypothesis that she had rabies. Now if that's true that would be extremely bad news. So rabies is considered 100% fatal. There's only a handful of cases that have been documented of people who have seemed to survive rabies after the onset of symptoms. There is a vaccine and if you get the vaccine before the onset of symptoms, then it can be effective, but after the onset of symptoms, it is considered uh fatal.

Um, nonetheless, at this point with these four symptoms, Georgie went to the emergency room. And part of what's interesting is what happens as Georgie tries to figure out what the best explanation is for her symptoms. The doctors are trying to figure out what the best explanation is for her symptoms. The nurses are all speculating about what the best explanation is for her symptoms. And the reason I like this case so much, which I should say I I I'm going to spoiler, it it has an okay ending, right? Otherwise, I we would surely not like the story so much. Um, what I like so much about it is that it really illustrates one of our explanatory preferences or biases, which is to favor explanations that are simple in the sense that they posit one or a small number of causes to explain multiple effects or observations.

So, we have four symptoms and rabies is just one cause that explains all four potentially. But all four of them, all four of uh the symptoms are things that could have lots of other causes, right? So, like lots of things cause a scratchy throat, right? It could just be that um Georgie was getting strep throat. It could be that she was getting a cold. It could be that she was getting COVID. It could be that she'd been in unusually dry air uh and that had dried out her throat. Right? And and same with all of her symptoms. And so we're in the situation where there's one cause that explains all four, but then there's lots of other explanations that might explain different combinations of the symptoms and different combinations.

And so the question is how do you how do you make this inference? Right? You have there's uncertainty about what the real causes are. It seems like the rabies explanation is especially attractive in that it's simpler. And how do you decide? And so one strategy that many people are probably familiar with is what's come to be known as AAM's razor. And it has a few different formulations, but one idea is that uh when you have multiple options and there's uncertainty, you should choose the simplest explanation as the one that's most likely to be true. And so one thought is maybe this is a case where AAM's razor applies, right?

Maybe this is a case where the simplest explanation is the one that we we ought to prefer. Um, so what I talk about in the in the book is some of the psychological evidence that we have about how it is that people actually go about making these kinds of decisions. You know, the Georgie example is fantastic because it is so vivid and striking. Uh, and at least when when I had a conversation with Georgie and learned about the story, I was like on the edge of my seat trying to wait find out what's going to happen next. But it turns out to mirror the structure of the kinds of studies that we can do in the lab.

And when we do these studies in the lab and put people in the situation of being something like the diagnostician who has to decide between a simple and a complex set of explanations, we as the experimenters get to control what the world is like, right? So we get to control what evidence participants have, what's actually likely, what's unlikely, uh, and so on. And so in that controlled lab context, we can actually ask the question not just do people prefer the simpler explanation, but are they preferring the simpler explanation more than they ought to given the probabilistic evidence that they have?

And that is what we find in lab studies that set up situations that mirror that kind of situation. What we find is that people are sensitive to probabilistic evidence. So, for example, if you put them in a world where the simple explanation is extremely rare relative to lots of alternatives, they'll choose it less often. So, you know, people are paying attention to the data, but at the same time, you see a preference for the simple explanation that goes above and beyond what their probabilistic evidence warrants. Yes. And I want to come right back to to Aram's razor. Let's just And what was the end of Georgie's uh story?

Just so we don't leave anybody hanging. Yes. Thank you. There was a happy story for Georgie here. She did not have rabies, thankfully. Um, it did turn out that there were multiple independent causes responsible for different sets of her symptoms. And so, part of how the story resolves is she sort of has these additional observations and pieces of evidence that help her piece this together and figure out what's really happening. I mean, just just to to tell you part of that, um, she she does kind of develop a cold. She starts to sneeze, for example. sneezing is not a characteristic symptom of rabies, but it's the sort of thing you might expect to go along with general malaise and some of her other symptoms.

And so over the course of the next few days, she develops a cold. She realizes that she had actually burned her tongue and that's why her tongue felt funny and so on. And so what looked like it was four uh independent effects that were explained by rabies actually turned out to have something more like three or four causes, which is a very unsatisfying explanation in terms of our explanatory preferences. But frankly in this case by far the explanation I prefer in terms of the real world consequences. Okay. So Aam's razor is it incorrect? Is it incomplete? I like the phrase incomplete. I think that might be a good way to think about it.

There's a lot of debate about this, right? So some people like Richard Fineman famously and Einstein other people talked about beauty, simplicity, elegance being a mark of truth. Um, so that's that's one possibility. One possibility is that we live in a world that at some fundamental level is in fact simple and beautiful such that we can take simplicity as a guide to truth. I'm going to be agnostic about whether that holds for the fundamental laws of physics. I think it does not hold for the everyday things we tend to explain in everyday life. Right? So you you're your kid is upset or there's traffic or your friend is mad or a store is closed or you know there's inflation.

I just don't think that for those kinds of things, the things we spend most of our time explaining, there's any reason to think that the world is actually going to be simple. And so for those cases, I think it's probably incomplete. And part of the reason I say incomplete there, and part of the reason I like that that phrase I used is because it is true that if you make some additional probabilistic assumptions, it will be true that fewer causes are more likely. So for example, if you're explaining things by appeal to causes that are rare and that are independent of one another, then it is more likely that just one rare thing will have happened rather than two independent rare things.

And so what we might be seeing in some cases like our lab experiments is that people are taking something like a rule of thumb or heristic that applies pretty well for some range of real world cases and they're just overextending it. they're they're using it to a case where where they're actually it doesn't really apply well there because they have enough independent evidence to be able to make a more accurate inference. Um so that's one possibility. Um the other possibility that I that I explore in the book and that I that I like although I'll say the we don't have a ton of data on this yet is an idea that I call AAM's machete and this is in contrast to AAM's razor.

And the mental picture that I want people to have when I say AA's machete is of somebody kind of in this very complicated dense world and they're sort of cutting a path towards the truth. And the idea here is that there's no guarantee that the world is actually simple, that the answer to our questions will actually be simple. But maybe the strategy of systematically trying to find and consider simple hypotheses and simple explanations, maybe that's actually a good way to learn about the world. Maybe that's part of what keeps us exploring, investigating, learning more, thinking about new ways to represent and reason about the world in a way that might actually be beneficial even if where it takes us sometimes at the end of the day is to a complex explanation, not a simple one.

Yes. I I liked the idea uh seek simplicity and distrust it. Yes. So that's a quote from Alfred North Whitehead who's an English mathematician and philosopher. Um, and I love that quote as well because I think it just captures two sides of what I think is he's talking about science, but I think it just captures these our everyday explanatory impulses where on the one hand there's something so satisfying about a simple explanation, right? We're really motivated to find one. And I think we can use that motivation to uh lead us to better theorizing, better learning, better discovery, and so on. But at the same time, we need to do so with this other explanatory angel on our shoulder telling us all the time like, but maybe not, right?

Uh maybe the world's not actually that beautiful. Maybe you should keep in mind that you might be imposing the simplicity on the world rather than really uh capturing the structure of what's really there. And so it's it's a little bit like um uh planning for the worst while hoping for the best or something like that. sort of having these two explanatory uh emotions at the same time guiding our actions while at the same time not letting ourselves be seduced by the simplicity that we're seeking. Yeah. Because we error on the side of simplicity because it's easier. It's going to require a much lower cognitive load.

Um, yeah. And so we're we're going to use AMA's machete for most of our inquiries, but be open to the fact that things are probably more complex than our instincts would naturally point us towards. Is that accurate? Yeah, I think that's right. I think it it is worth saying that there's a couple of cases where it looks like people actually prefer more complicated explanations. And so that's really interesting. But just just to share one of those, people seem to have a preference for explanations that in some way match what they're trying to explain. So if you're trying to explain something that you think is really, really complicated, that might lead you to expect a more complicated explanation.

Mhm. And so although I think it's true that in many contexts we're going to prefer the simpler explanation and we're going to be more likely to generate hypotheses that are simple to remember them to share them with others and so on. There are these interesting nuances where sometimes it seems like complexity has attractive properties. Now I was really interested in in how all of this affects kids and there is a um anecdote in the book here. 64 kids watch an episode of Clifford the Big Red Dog and it's about be Clifford befriends a three-legged dog. Um, adults come away with uh be kind to people who are different or people with disabilities, whatever their take is, but it's along those lines.

What did the kids often come away with? Yeah, the kids came away with a lesson along the lines of be nice to three-legged dogs, which is a lovely message, right? I think it's a positive message. I think we should be nice to three-legged dogs. But, you know, clearly clearly it's much more specific, much more concrete, much more narrow than I assume the writers of that episode of Clifford intended. And presumably much more narrow than what parents who perhaps are watching that with their kids would hope them to get out of the experience. Sure. and in the um let's see, I jotted it down. Um yeah, because it was 81% got the um the wrong lesson uh from the episode amongst the kids.

And I think the the natural instinct there as a parent is to tell them what the moral of the story was, right? To to just Well, it's not really about being nice to three-legged dogs. what they're really getting at is this bigger lesson of being kind to people who are different than you. What's a different way parents could handle that? And what's what's wrong with just jumping to what the actual conclusion um is, right? So, I should say probably telling them the abstract lesson there will do some good. It's just not going to be the most effective way to get the kids there. Um, part of the reason is that you you really want the children to understand that there's some more abstract principle or pattern for them to extract.

And if you can get them to do that abstraction and extraction themselves, they're more likely to understand it and be able to generalize it to new contexts. And part of the reason why we looked at this phenomenon in the studies that you're referring to is because we had the hypothesis that engaging in the process of explaining might be one of the mechanisms by which kids and adults too can go beyond very specific concrete narrow ways of thinking about something to having a more generalizable or abstract representation that would allow them to generalize to new cases. And so the thought was if we can get kids in these sorts of contexts where they're reading a story and trying to extract the moral of a story, if we can get them to engage in explanation, maybe they themselves will be able to identify the more abstract lesson.

And so we ran a study where kids basically went through like a story book, but then at key points in the story book, they were prompted to answer a question themselves and they were not given any feedback on their answer. So, we had a story that was similar to the Clifford story. It wasn't identical, but the equivalent in that story would be, for example, when the um three-legged dog is upset about having been excluded from a game, we'd ask the child, why do you think that dog is is feel is feeling sad and excluded? Uh and then later when Clifford and his friends decide to include him, we might say, why do you think Clifford decided to do that?

Right? Right? So there were these sort of strategic points in the story where we introduced these why questions and the kids would generate answers without feedback. So the adults not really doing anything other than giving them the why question. And then we at the end we again asked them to try to tell us what the general story is, the general sorry lesson of the story. And what we found is that the kids who'd been prompted to explain were significantly more likely than those who were not prompted to explain to extract the general story. something like be nice to those who are different from you rather than the much much narrower uh theme that you might extract about being kind to three-legged dogs for that particular story.

Um we also compared this to a case where the adults just told them what the lesson of the story was and that was not as effective as having the kids arrive at it themselves by being prompted to explain. And I think part of the reason is because just being told something is no guarantee that you understand it, that it's connected to the other things that you know about the world in a way that means that you're going to be able to use that information that you're given. Right? I could I could tell a 5-year-old that E= MC² and they could repeat that back to me. But if it's not connected to other things they know in the right way, they're not going to be able to do anything with that.

Right? So often just having what what's sometimes called a direct instruction where you just tell somebody what you want them to understand unless they already have all of the right building blocks to really be able to understand that and hook it up to the things that they already know. That's not going to be sufficient. Yeah. Seth Goden is the first person that I I heard this from, but I just find it's core to good teaching, which is don't steal the insight from the student. And wow, if you can ask the right probing questions so that they can have the insight themselves and I believe uh the authors of Make It Stick have backed this up with very detailed research that when students or children come to their own insights, they're able to recall it and use it for exponentially longer time frames.

Um because just like you said, it then ties into all the things that they already know and becomes integrated into their knowledge base rather than something they might be able to repeat back, not really have a grasp on, and then a day later, a week later, a month later, whatever it is, it just disappears and it's off into the ether. That's right. There there's actually a really interesting phenomenon called the self-exlanation effect that's been documented initially really in educational context but it it holds more broadly than that and it's basically that if you explain to yourself you will often learn material better remember it better be able to generalize it to new context better than engaging in a variety of other kinds of processes.

So, for example, if you're reading non-fiction and as you're reading, you stop and ask yourself questions and do your best to answer them, you are likely to learn that material and remember it much better than if you just read it twice. Um, and part of what's interesting about that phenomenon is that you get those benefits even though you're not getting new or different information. You're basically just processing that information more deeply in a way that's going to help you generate real understanding. This episode of the Nick Stanley Show is brought to you by Zapier. If you've ever felt buried in repetitive work, copying data, moving files, sending follow-ups, you know it's like death by a thousand mouse clicks.

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And and just a heads up, I did that with with this book. So I went to okay, let's look at the chapters. What sounds interesting right away? And constantly I don't have all of the context that the author intended. Um, but it forces me to work harder to understand what's going on. And then if I if I really really enjoy the book, I will then go back and go through it in order. Um, which is what I will do next with why Ask Why? Because I think this is really um interesting, provocative, important um questions that you're asking. And um Yeah. Well, let's let's talk about the importance of those desirable difficulties as a way to Yeah.

Yeah. run with that. Your example is really interesting. I'm going to confess I don't know of any studies that have looked at your particular strategy. I'd be really curious if there is anything out there for reading out of order in particular, but what you're describing in general makes a lot of sense. So, desirable difficulties are basically features of a learning situation that make the learning more difficult or more effortful, but that nonetheless result in more effective learning. And that typically means deeper understanding and better retention. Um, why would this be? Uh well, in part it's because you have to work harder, right?

Doing the cognitive work of figuring out how different pieces fit together, figuring out what it is you do and don't know, that cognitive work is part of what allows us to construct the mental representations that really support understanding. And that cognitive work also helps us direct our own learning as learners, right? So, for example, realizing that you don't understand something that you thought you understood, that is incredibly important for learning because now you know which questions to ask, what to reread, what to spend more time thinking about, and so on. Uh, and so all of these processes that perhaps introduce what is sometimes described as friction or difficulty or mental effort tend to be good for the ultimate outcome of learning.

Yeah. And I mean, and this got this became very meta, but to tie it back to to your work, as I was going through this, I thought, oh, it's interesting that if I start with chapter six, let's say, I have to come up with some of my own explanations, which eventually when I get to those beginning chapters, then that contrasts with the explanations that I came up with in what those building blocks were. And it it again, yeah, it makes it a lot harder to progress that way. Um but that contrast of what I thought the explanation was and they go oh that's no that's that's actually not correct. This is this is what the proper building blocks were in order um I think leads to deeper uh retention.

Um but it was yeah a thought running through my head um as I as I read it. Um and then last last question on the on the children here. Um, when children ask why repeatedly, um, it can it can feel bothersome and sometimes it's a game to them to just kind of push their parents. Um, but it can also be flipped around. I mean, it can be a game of continuing to ask, encourage them to ask why, to get to deeper and deeper explanations. Um, what are your what are your thoughts on uh, children asking why repeatedly? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there were some really clever studies that were done. This is now a couple decades ago to try to get at the question of whether or not when children ask those chains of why questions which will be, you know, very familiar to parents of young kids.

They just will keep asking why and why. And you might think to yourself, they're just trying to annoy me. They're just trying to get attention. They've just figured out that this is a strategy for getting, you know, sort of adult conversation. Uh and so the researchers really wanted to know are when they ask why in these contexts, are they really looking for an explanation? are they really engaged in some sort of systematic learning process or is it more just a you know game a ploy for attention and so on. And so one of the things that they did is in both analyses of natural transcripts of sort of parents and adults having these these explanatory dialogues and also in lab context they tried to see what happens when a child gets a good versus a bad answer to their why question.

Right? Right? So suppose that child asks why and the parent gives them an explanatory answer or they do something like say just because. Uh now if the kid just wants attention they're going to presumably respond in pretty similar ways. In both time cases they got attention they got a verbal response and so on. But in fact you find these really nice systematic differences. So, when kids get a non-explanatory answer to their question, they're more likely to try to answer the question themselves or to repeat the same question. When they actually get an explanatory question, they do something different.

They tend to ask a follow-up question. And that's really cool and demonstrates something that actually we we find with adults as well. When you get a satisfying answer to your question, you might have thought that just sort of like shuts down inquiry, right? You're like, "Okay, I'm done. I got a satisfying answer. So I can stop learning, I can go home. That doesn't seem to be what happens either with kids in these explanatory dialogues or with adult participants in our own studies. Rather, when people get a satisfying answer to their question, that makes them more curious about follow-up questions.

And so you can sort of see these chains of why questions as really being strategic ways to guide your inquiry rather than rather than being I mean they might also play a social role. Kids might also like the attention. And I'm not going to say those things play no role, but we do have good evidence that those are not sort of idle questions in the sense that they are uh not in fact being motivated by genuine curiosity or um that they sort of they they are effective in driving learning. Yeah. Now in 1998 um Allison Gopnik published a uh title published a paper with very provocative uh title and what was it called and what is she what was she actually talking about um with this provocative paper?

Yeah. Uh so for context for those who might not know Allison Gobnik is a phenomenal developmental cognitive scientist um who's written many many great books for a general audience in addition to publishing a lot of scientific work and her provocative paper was called explanation as orgasm and she was doing a couple of things in that paper. So one of the things that she was doing was drawing attention to the fact that the process of explaining has all sorts of affective feelings emotions experiences associated with it. So, we experience curiosity and that's part of what initiates a process of seeking explanations and we experience satisfaction when we get a really good explanation or dissatisfaction when we get a bad explanation.

And so, the the explanation as orgasm is really picking up on the sense of explanatory satisfaction, right? We have this this experience of getting a good explanation. And the question she asks is why is it that explaining has this positive experience associated with it? And the thought is that, you know, just as orgasm is sort of an evolutionarily bestowed carrot to motivate you to engage in activities that are likely to lead to reproduction, the satisfying sense of getting a really good explanation is an evolutionarily endowed carrot to motivate you to engage in the kinds of activities that will support learning.

So even though it might seem to us like we're engaging in various activities in order to get a satisfying explanation, uh really we're engaging those activities because they're likely to lead us to learn about the environment. Yes. And so if I'm um getting this straight, um it may it may seem that we construct and use theories in order to achieve explanation in the same way that we have sex in order to achieve orgasm. But from an evolutionary point of view, however, the relationship is reversed. We experience orgasms and explanations to ensure that we make babies and create theories to understand the world.

That's right. Um, so the aha is kind of like a bribe to keep us going to dig to dig deeper and understand. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It's a motivation and you can think of curiosity as being the analogy of lust on this kind of story, right? is is sort of what motivates us to initiate the kinds of activities which in this case will support learning. Um so psychologists sometimes talk about what are called epistemic emotions or epistemic feelings and those are the emotions or feelings that really uh govern the process of learning. Right? So if when you experience something like curiosity that's part of what's going to motivate you to bother to get out of your armchair and go uh you know make some observations.

If you experience confusion, that's a sort of slightly aversive kind of feeling that's maybe tells you that you haven't quite figured things out, right? So, there's a host of these epistemic feelings or emotions that really play a very important part in directing our own learning. The two I talk about most in the book are what I call explanation, seeking curiosity. So, that's like the flavor of curiosity that really leads us to look for explanations and explanatory satisfaction. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and we're all about being curious on the Nick Stanley show. Um, I want to read some of your words uh back to you here because this one this was the part that that uh gutted me because I thought you really hit on a on a truth here with our kids.

Um, and and I say gutted not in a bad way. Um, in the best possible way just because it it rang so true. Um, as a parent, I constantly hit the wall of conventions when I'm truly after stories. After I pick up a child from school or an activity, a typical conversation might go like this. How was your day at school? Fine. Uh, why did practice run late today? It just does sometimes. Uh, why so many text and calls? Friend drama. Every parent listening to this, if you have middle schoolers, teenagers especially, you're going to be nodding um, right now. What's going on in those exchanges? Yeah. So in that particular passage um I'm I'm talking about a distinction that comes from uh Charles Tilly who has a book called why and he introduces a distinction between conventions and stories right so conventions are sort of our conventional stock of answers you can give to things you know how are you I'm fine just because you know things happen um friend drama um and one thing that those do is that they don't give you a lot of information.

They sort of give you like the schema for a for an answer, but they don't really give you a full answer. So, part of what's going on in that example is on the one hand, of course, I want more information from my kids. That's one dimension of what's going on. I just want to learn more. But there's this other dimension going on too, and I think this is part of why it's so infuriating for parents, which is that there there's a little bit of a signal there which is like, well, I don't have the kind of relationship with you that means that I have to tell you the whole story. it's okay with me to merely tell you the convention, right?

Like I guarantee you that if one of my daughter's best friends asked her what was going on, she would not say friend drama. She would give her friend the whole story. Um, so part of what this illustrates is that we we use explanations for lots of different things and our choices about how we explain communicate a lot. One layer of that is maybe what we can think of as the purelyformational layer. It's how much am I communicating to you? What am I communicating to you? Are you getting accurate information and so on. But then there's also this interpersonal social layer which is about what kinds of explanations we do and don't owe to each other.

And that means that using different kinds of explanations can also be a way to signal, negotiate, change what our very social relationships are to each other. Yeah. And so a conventional answer is one that we usually reserve for strangers or those we we don't know that well. And I think as a as a parent, the reason it stings is because suddenly you feel like a stranger to that same kid who was always going to tell you the whole story and and even more. Um, but I would also say that's why I say I don't think that it's all bad because this is this is part of this process of kids separating from their parents and they need to go through that process to become independent, fully functional adults on their own.

Um, but it can be it can it can sting a little um as a as a parent when you're going through that. Um, yeah. Well, and I and I did want to ask when you um mentioned this is how is this the same the same daughter that was up at at 3:00 a.m. in the beginning? I mean, I read again I read the chapters out of order. So, that was one question that was linked. Yeah. So, so, so there's two daughters. They are currently 12 and 15. Okay. Um uh and so different anecdotes in the book will draw on different different aspects of their lives. So I do start the book with this anecdote which is now several years old when one of them was a newborn and the other one was a toddler.

Uh when I wrote the passage that you just quoted from I was drawing on much more recent experience of you know driving around my teens and tween and trying to get them to tell me about their about their lives. Yeah. Well, so for if I'm a parent and I'm going through this and and experiencing this and I want more communication, more rich communication uh with my kids of of similar ages, what are some of the ways I can change that dynamic? Yeah. So, I should say I don't know of research for the the explanation cases I talk about specifically in the book, but I think we can generalize a lesson from other other pockets of research in parenting.

So I think in general it's going to be the case that conventional questions are going to make it easier to give conventional answers, right? We all we all have the sort of schema for how was your day? Good. Thank you. And so on, right? Uh and so the the strategy that I've been trying is that maybe if you ask less conventional questions, you're going to preclude some of these conventional answers and maybe get somewhere that's a little bit more real. And so I think asking questions that are not the conventional ones and that are perhaps much more specific, much more factual. So instead of asking something like, "How was your day?" asking something like, um, "How was your geometry class today compared to yesterday?

Was it more fun or was it less fun?" Mhm. Okay, that's a very specific question. You're not demanding a treatise from your child. Um, doesn't really support a conventional answer as easily, right? And so I think starting with these, you know, unconventional, more specific questions might be a strategy that can help in some cases. Yeah, I have found as an anecdote, uh, did anything weird happen at school today can be a good one to just catch them off guard a little bit. That little bit of surprise and they might come back with a more rich answer. Although, you can't just repeat that question because then it becomes conventional.

That's right. I've tried I've tried all sorts. What was the funniest thing that happened at school? What was the weirdest thing that happened at school? I think you're exactly right because part of what you're doing there is breaking the mold of asking a conventional question. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I did I mean and I I just feel like it was such a salient moment in the book. Um the uh the the exact wording here you used um they not only withhold additional information, but they also imply it's none of my business to know more. Ouch. Uh but what's a mom to do? I and yeah, that just I I I I know that um experience from uh my own my wife's uh friends.

Um and it yeah, that one that one struck a chord with me. If you find yourself guessing at your kids' college odds, know that it doesn't have to be that way. There's a website. You pick a college, any four-year college in the country, type in your student's GPA and their SAT or ACT score, and you get to see their odds. built from that college's own published admissions data. Change the score, watch the results change. You can look up any high school in the country as well to see their results at getting kids into the UC's. It's free. It's called Reach and you can get there at www. highchoolreach.com.

Okay, let's turn to the devices in our pockets and the creation of AI, which is obviously the biggest thing happening in in human society right now. Um, how does that affect our ability to produce our own explanations for questions that we have, especially AI in particular, which doesn't it's it's different than just googling an answer because it's giving you an explanation. It's spoon feeding it to you. And I'm curious for your thoughts on is that good, is that bad, is it how we use it that makes the difference? want to say all of the above. Um, I think I think it's good in some ways, bad in some ways, and it depends enormously on how we use it.

So, to unpack that a little bit, one way that I think it can be good is that I think it can actually be very motivating in the sense that it satisfies our curiosity and lets us pursue our curiosity in a relatively easy way. So, anecdotally, I think you see this with people falling down rabbit holes, right? That's kind of like a pleasurable learning experience that we can now pursue much more easily about lots of things than I think we probably could at any previous point in human history, right? You just suddenly you're just curious about something and you get an answer and then you can ask a follow-up and you can ask another follow-up and you can ask another follow-up and I think that is potentially fantastic.

So that seems great. The problem is that satisfying your curiosity like that does not necessarily support the best learning. Right? Right? So, we already talked about the fact that sometimes learning should be effortful. Sometimes you want to do the work to get to the answer yourself. And so, even though this experience of getting lots of explanations in a relatively effortless and seamless way, can be very satisfying, can satisfy your curiosity, might even motivate curiosity. I think it's going to mean that you're learning less. So, you you might have had the experience, you fall down a rabbit hole now, you find it very pleasurable and interesting, and then 2 hours later you're like, what was that?

what was the thing I was reading? Right? What did I learn? Right? It's really you probably have not done the cognitive work to construct a really coherent, usable uh communicable mental representation of what it is that you were trying to learn. Um so that's the danger really is I think that we're going to see concerns about learning and also about the process of learning. So part of what you might not be doing when you engage in at least something like a straightforward interaction with a chatbot is certain kinds of critical processes that I think good education can try to encourage like well what are the alternatives what are your sources what's another way to think about that what's the argument against that you know unless you are bringing that to the interaction you're not going to get that for free um and so I see that as a as a serious risk um now I should say it's a serious risk of the way that a lot of contemporary chat bots And currently AI summaries for short search are constructed.

I don't think it is an inherent risk of AI. I think there are ways that we could use AI systems differently uh design different interfaces and so on that might actually do a really good job of introducing desirable difficulties for learning and scaffolding learning. So, I don't want to say in a categorical way that AI is bad for learning, but am I seriously concerned as a parent, a human, and a college professor about some of the current tools that are available and some of the ways that people are currently using them? Yes, I am very concerned about that. Yeah, and I think you've really hit the nail on the head here.

Um, I have I have badgered my clawude to not just confirm every thought or idea that I have as brilliant and the most amazing thing the AI has ever heard and to force it to ask me more questions about my underlying assumptions. But it was a lot of work to get the model to function like that consistently. And my concern is it suddenly dawned on me, well every user's experience is different with their own account and our kids if they're not being actively pushed or not not pushed um if they don't understand the benefits for themselves and have have not come to their own explanations about why that would be a good idea to set it up in that way then they're going to also receive that even if they said hey um check My understanding of this, the basic models as they exist today will gleefully tell you that you nailed it.

Oh, you couldn't have said it better. You so crushed it. And then we'll brush past that onto the onto the next thing. Um, and and I do think that's a I don't know from a user standpoint, that's an important, at least at this moment in time, um, to really try to push back on that so we don't don't get the downsides, but we can still have the upsides of exploring our curiosity because I'm I'm with you. I mean, it's it's such a wonderful thing to be able to explore ideas and questions on the spot at any moment with these really intelligent machines. Yeah, I think that's right. And I I I really hope that a lot of the you know engineers and human computer interaction experts and education experts who are thinking about the next sort of development of these systems are implementing some of the things that you've already managed to do yourself, right?

And using what we know about human psychology and human learning to think about how we want these systems configured for different contexts. And I think a particularly vulnerable population to be thinking about is students um and how to how to think about these tools and in the context of high school, elementary school, college and so on. Yes, I agree. And I had a there was an interesting push back when I mentioned something similar to a uh marketing expert and he said, "I'm not sure that the marketing information that they've gotten back supports that people want that." and and that was that was an interesting insight even though it would be good for them.

Um it if you're running a business and you're trying to rush towards your initial public offering uh to all become billionaires, it's hard to have an incentive to do that. Um but I hope they find a way and I hope they just easily build in a mode um that would push for for deeper learning and use those psychological tools. Um let's see on on curiosity being contagious. I thought this was a really interesting concept. Um let's let's dig into that a bit. Absolutely. So the the research you're referring to was motivated by the question of how people decide what to be curious about. And that doesn't mean it's a conscious decision, but we are curiously we are clearly curious about some things and not others or more curious about some things than others.

So what what determines that? And there's a lot of good reasons to think and some of our own research suggests that one of the main things that you use in order to decide whether or not to be curious or your I should say maybe your brain uses right this is not again a conscious process where you're explicitly deciding this is your expectation about whether or not there's useful learning to be found. So when we have cues from our environment that suggest that there is something useful to learn that might that's when we might be curious. So, for example, one thing that often triggers curiosity is something unexpected or surprising.

If something was unexpected or surprising, it probably wasn't something that like fit in to your current beliefs about the world. And so, being curious about it makes sense because there's a high potential there to learn about something new that might revise your beliefs, tell you something new. And what we were interested in specifically is, well, how do people use social information in these cases? Humans are extremely social creatures. We're very social learners. We most of what we know we don't know from our direct observations. We know because we learned it from somebody else or we read it, right?

We got it from other humans testimony. And so the thought is that these social cues in our environment about what information is worth having might actually be part of what shapes our own curiosity. And the way that we decided to investigate this was by putting people in an experiment where they interacted with a platform that looked kind of like a sort of social media question asking sort of site. So, it sort of looked a little bit like, you know, Twitter or Reddit or something like that where you see these individual posts that involve questions and you could sort of click on them to get answers and those questions are associated with up votes.

And so, you can see how many upvotes a question like, uh, why does ice crackle when you pour water on it? How many up votes did that question get versus how many up votes did the question why is this guy blue get? And so on. And because this isn't a laboratory experiment, we could manipulate what these up votes were. And so we could show the very same question where some participants would interact with it in a context where there were lots of up votes and other people would interact with it in a context where there were very few up votes. And this allowed us to ask whether or not just this social information about whether or not other people thought this was a good question affected people's own curiosity about the answers to those questions.

And the answer was that it did. So when people saw questions that were associated with a larger number of up votes, they themselves were more curious about the answer to those questions, suggesting that we use other people as one of our sources of information about what is worth knowing. So it is very important who we choose to surround ourselves with in determining what we will be curious about in the future. That's right. That's right. And you know, not just the other people. I think in general our choices about the environment that we put ourselves in are going to have a very big impact on what it is that we are curious about and that in turn is going to have an impact on what it is we learn.

What we learn will in turn have an impact on what it is we're curious about and so on. Right? So there's all sorts of ways in which we are making decisions that affect what our future selves will know because we are deciding who we surround ourselves with, what information we expose ourselves to and so on. Yeah. And there was an interesting experiment. Forgive me if I'm uh not getting the specific details of it right, but it was the the insight was that when when we're reading about an expert knowing something is true, we are more likely to feel that we understand it ourselves. Is that am I summarizing that correctly?

That's right. That's right. So this is really interesting research. This is this was not in my lab. This is a phenomenon called the contagious sense of understanding and the way it worked is that participants basically learned about some scientific phenomenon and they were not given an explanation for it but they were told either that scientists you know the experts do have an explanation for it and understand it themselves or that the scientists don't yet have an explanation for it and don't understand it themselves. In neither case did the participant themselves get an explanation. Nonetheless, when participants were asked how well they understood the phenomenon, they were more likely to report that they had some understanding of it in the case where they were told that the scientists understood it.

And so sort of a contagious sense of understanding because the idea is you kind of caught it from the scientists, right? The scientists really do understand uh and somehow when we have access to the scientists, we sort of feel like maybe we have access to that understanding as well. H and if our environment is shaping our curiosity, what what's happening to all of us that are spending hours each day on social media feeds because that is part of our environment and especially with young people spend even more time uh studies show in in in the feeds. How's that feed and that social media shaping people's curiosity in general?

Yeah, that's a great question and there's, you know, there's been a lot of research on aspects of social media environments and echo chambers and I don't know of too much that has looked at curiosity specifically, but if I try to put together the strands of, you know, we do know from the research, I think the concern is that when you are in an environment that's sort of like an echo chamber, you're getting the same information reinforced, you're being exposed to things that are perhaps consistent with one particular worldview or ideology, it's going to push you to ask further questions and go further in that direction, right?

So, if you ask a question and I give you an answer and you find it satisfying and then you want to ask a follow-up question, the follow-up question is going to sort of build on that starting point. You're rarely going to ask a follow-up question that goes back to the beginning and says, "Okay, now I want you to give me an answer that starts from totally different presuppositions, right? Like that's not normally how it works, right? Right? So if you think about something like conspiracy theory that you get exposed to uh somebody asks something about you know why a particular type of building managed to collapse in the um in 9/11 and you get an explanation.

A natural follow-up question is going to be something like well why did they build it that way or you know exactly how did that happen? It sort of accepts as a premise some of what you found satisfying about the explanation and goes further. And so I think the danger is that people's curiosity is going to be channeled in the directions that are consistent with the perspectives and ideologies that they've been exposed to rather than encouraging them to revisit the foundations of those beliefs or to consider radically different perspectives. So it might reinforce what we see in echo chambers where people perhaps think they have more evidence for their views than they really ought to, that their views are more mainstream than they really are and so on.

Is it accurate to say if someone is then pushed to explain come up with their own explanations as to why an extreme idea that they believe is true when they're forced to explain it that then sometimes that will pull them off the extreme the extreme belief that that underpins uh whatever it is that they're trying to explain. Yeah, there is some evidence consistent with that. So there's this phenomenon called the illusion of explanatory depth and basically it refers to the fact that we tend to overestimate our own explanatory understanding of how things work. That applies to mechanical things like how zippers works and how toilets work.

But it also applies to political things like how a cap and trade system works or how a particular taxation policy works and so on. Uh and there are there is some research that when you get people to try to explain some of the relevant uh mechanisms behind these sorts of policy views or political views that helps them realize that they don't actually understand it as well as they thought they did and then that in turn can sometimes lead them to hold a less extreme view. Um but it's worth saying that that's not found across the board for all political views. So when a political view is held perhaps more ideologically because it aligns with your values, it's harder to have these kinds of interventions uh really shift people away from the beliefs that they already strongly hold.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I I know um you need to pick up your daughter and and I um I I could uh I could keep keep doing this for uh all day. Um but let's let's wind it uh down here with with this. Um one of the the other guiding principles is that explanations don't just describe the past, they decide the future for an individual. And you end the book saying that the world depends on us to ask the right questions, which I love. For a parent listening to this in the car, 15-year-old in the back seat, um, and both of them are quiet, what's the what's the right question? Oh gosh, that is a hard question.

Um, I should have sent that one to you ahead of time. Yeah. Yeah. I think I need a couple hours to think this one through. You know, I I don't think there's going to be one answer. And part of the reason there's not going to be one answer is because the world would be a very dull place if we were all asking exactly the same questions, right? Part of the idea behind the the principle that you that you quote from the book. So the book has these sort of two guiding principles and one of them is this idea that explanations don't just describe the past, they decide the future. Part of the reason explanation is so valuable at that nexus between trying to make sense of something and figuring out your next step is that it is going to be very contextually specified by your context, what you care about, what your values are, what you're trying to understand, and so on.

Um, and in that sense, I think we should be asking different questions, right? Because we're asking for different reasons to guide different actions. You're asking to guide your actions and I'm asking to guide mine and so on. When I end there in the context of the book, I am trying to zoom out a little bit to think about what can we be all all be doing as individuals to understand the aspects of the world that are going to maybe have the greatest impact so that we make the best decisions moving forward. And some of the things that I have in mind in that context are things like politics and climate change and the future of humanity in the context of AI and our relationship to technology and so on.

Um, and so I think with those sorts of things in mind, not just as individuals, but as a society, we really want to be asking asking questions there, right? Not just not just taking the status quo, not just accepting the set of answers that we've been given, uh, but really encouraging the 15-year-olds in the back who are going to inherit so much of what we're leaving them along all of these political and environmental and technological dimensions, um, to make sure we're really asking ourselves whether we're making the right choices and how to make those choices in the best way possible. See, I put you on the spot and you nailed it.

Uh, absolutely nailed it. Um, the book is Why We Ask Why coming out in October will be available wherever you buy your books online. We have a link down in the description to the book to make it really easy to get to it. And then if anyone wants to find you online, where are the best places to look? If you can spell my name, Tanya Lamroszo, you'll find me at www.ttonylroszo.com and you'll have links to the book as well as to all my social media feeds and so on. If you can't spell that correctly, which I will forgive you for, you can do why we ask why.com, which will take you to the same place. Perfect.

And we have links to all of that down in the description as well with the correct spelling, so it'll take you to all the right places. Um, and we'll put all your social profiles in there as well. Um, thank you so much. This was a uh such a pleasure. Thank you. You've given me a lot to think about that I'll continue to think about and question. So, thank you so much, Nick. I appreciate it. All right. Okay, everybody. Until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo and be curious. The Nick Stley Show.