Why spirituality is important in our increasingly secular world (w/ David DeSteno) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy: 

You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy when it comes to how to find meaning in life, how to deal with tragedy, grief and loss, how to build community, and honestly how to be a better human. One of the clearest answers for many people is through religion and faith. We've never done an episode that's explicitly about that, about religion and spirituality before.

And that's because it's, it's hard to figure out how to talk about prayer or religious beliefs in a way that doesn't immediately exclude people or turn a lot of people off. But I think that we've probably been missing out by not having that conversation because it's a really important piece of many people's lives.

I know for me personally, faith and belief have been a real comfort in my life, a real help for me. And I know that that's probably true for many of you too. And at the same time, I also have a lot of friends who are very much against organized religion of any kind for very good reasons. So I think that today's guest psychology professor David DeSteno, is gonna do a great job of allowing us to speak to both camps as well as to everyone in between.

David is the author of the book, How God Works and the host of the podcast by the same name, and he studies the science behind the benefits of religion. And what he has to say about his research and why he got into this. Well it might surprise you.

[00:01:23] David DeSteno: 

I, I have no agenda in this. In fact, if you ask me what do I believe, I'd say I'm an agnostic.

I, I don't know, but. What led me to this work is just simply looking at the data that's out there from what we know, people who engage with spirituality live longer, healthier, and happier lives. And as someone who studies human wellbeing and human morality, I can't ignore that data. And so I became very interested in trying to figure out what's going on because it would be the height of hubris for a scientist to assume that traditions that for millennia have been trying to help people deal with life's challenges, didn't have something to offer. 

And so I think if we're really going to find ways to make life better for people, then we have to be open to some of the ideas that are there. Doesn't mean you have to buy the theology, but there is a wisdom of the ages that we have to, I think, take seriously.

[00:02:21] Chris Duffy: 

We will be back with more from David and more of the wisdom of the ages right after this break. Don't go anywhere.

Today we're talking about faith, spirituality, and religion with David DeSteno. 

[00:02:41] David DeSteno: 

Hi, I'm Dave DeSteno, host of the PRX podcast, How God Works and author of the book of the same name. 

[00:02:48] Chris Duffy: 

Well, I wanted to start by just actually starting the way that you start your book and reading the first three paragraphs from page one, um, because I think they really lay out the stakes and also your perspective on how God works.

“How do you raise a child to be a good person? What are your responsibilities to your family, your friends, and your community? How do you cope with a serious illness? Can you find someone to love? And if you do, how do you go on when they're gone? How do you find joy and meaning in life, especially in difficult times, and how do you make sense of your life's inevitable end.”

“These are the questions that keep people up at night. They strike at the heart of what it means to be human, and so they keep me up at night too. Not only because I'm trying to figure out like millions of others how to live a good life, but also because for the past 30 years, my career has focused on uncovering ways to help people become more moral, more compassionate, and more resilient as they walk the road of life.”

“That might be surprising as I'm not a priest, therapist or life coach. I'm a research scientist. I conduct psychological experiments and few people would expect to find the meaning of life through scientific investigation and lab work.” Well, first of all, I just love it. I, I think your book is, as you can tell, it touches on some of the most important questions that we could possibly ask, and also is so approachable.

And many people think science and religion are mutually exclusive, but so much of your work is based on the idea that that is actually not true. That their relationship is something more nuanced. I think that for me, one of the comparisons that you draw that felt really interesting, and I hadn't thought of before was the idea of Bioprospecting, which I actually hadn't heard that term before.

So can you start by just explaining what Bioprospecting is and then talk about how that relates to your work? 

[00:04:25] David DeSteno: 

Sure. So Bioprospecting is a strategy by which, you know, pharmaceutical companies would go and look for biological agents that could, uh, help people heal from disease and in the middle part of the 20th century, they had developed lots of technology.

The problem is they had technology, but they didn't know what things to test. And so they would go into places like, like the Amazon or Southeast Asia and find traditional remedies for things. Now, of course, and they would test them, right? Is there something in there, in, in this plant that is supposed to, you know, treat some type of disease that actually works?

Lots of the times nothing worked, but sometimes it did. And through that we found medications that have helped deal with treatments for cancer and lots of other diseases. And my argument is when it comes to human wellbeing, we should do the same. That is these traditions, when people have a problem, who do they normally go to?

Oftentimes, especially in the ages before therapy, they would go to a priest, a rabbi, an imam, and they would look for advice and solace. And my notion, and it's a terrible word, the word I use is called religio prospecting. And the idea is we should do the same. We should go to these traditions and these practices.

Look at what they do, the ways they work on our mind and body, and see what we can learn and take from them in a respectful way that can help us meet life's challenges. And a lot of what I've been doing over the past decade or so is trying to draw those parallels and to show that there is a there in these practices that the data support.

And you know, we've kind of done this with meditation, right? Everybody's into meditation. Mindfulness is a hot thing. But my question is, well, it can't be the only one? Right. What's the next mindfulness? There's something out there if we have enough, you know, humility to go and look. 

[00:06:11] Chris Duffy: 

I think it's indicative of how tough of a, a spot you've carved out for yourself that I instinctively, as we're starting this interview, I'm like, let's start by addressing the concerns and skepticisms of the atheists, and then let's address the concerns of the faithful. 

But like, you know, you're kind of right in between, where both sides are skeptical of this. There's an unease to like looking at religion scientifically. 

[00:06:37] David DeSteno: 

Yeah. 

[00:06:37] Chris Duffy: 

And I think there's an unease on both sides. 

[00:06:39] David DeSteno: 

You're absolutely right and you know, people often ask me, “So Dave, do you believe in God?” And I say, “You know, that's the wrong question for what we're doing here. It's not that it's not an important question, it's one of the most important questions in the world, but it's not a question science can answer.”

Right? Uh, you know, unless you know the mind of God, you can't really run an experiment. You know, maybe God helps everybody and every third Tuesday, I, I don't know, or helps the people that God likes. But what we can do. Is study these practices in the way they work on our bodies and minds. And I tell people, “Look. I can't tell you if these practices and wisdom are gifts from a divine creator who, who loves its creations or the result of people figuring stuff out and trying stuff over millennia, but we don't need to know that answer to understand and study how and why they might help people.” 

And so what I try to get people to do is to like, let's not argue about the stuff that we can't answer. Let's just work together, respect each other's perspectives, and see what we can find. 

[00:07:36] Chris Duffy: 

I love that. A lot of your work is about if you do believe, here's some real data to support that these things that you intuitively know work for you that there are scientific, biological, structural reasons why they're working.

And if you are someone who does not believe, well, let's just stick with the science. And you're saying there's a lot from religion that is scientifically proven that you can take regardless of whether you take the deity part. 

[00:08:02] David DeSteno: 

That's right. When you look at the data saying you believe in God. It doesn't predict much.

It's people who are actually engaged in different types of spiritual practices who are deeply engaged with those mind, body practices and those struggles that show the benefit. There are ways that they work on our minds and bodies in the same way that lots of life hacks do. You know, we're a society that's like, gimme the life hack for this.

How do I lose weight? How do I study more? How do I do whatever? These practices are working on our minds and bodies in the same way, but they're so much more sophisticated. A typical life hack is like playing single notes on a piano, whereas these rituals, when you put them together are like symphonies.

[00:08:45] Chris Duffy: 

Can you tell us what the phrase spiritual technologies means, which you use a lot in your work? 

[00:08:49] David DeSteno: 

First, let me say that I got that phrase from Krista Tippett, so I don't want to take credit for coming up with it, but it, it's a wonderful phrase, right phrase, a technology right, is something that that helps us achieve a goal or solve a problem. 

And what a spiritual technology is, it is some type of mind body practice that helps us address a certain goal. So you know, what might those be? Things like meditation and contemplation. Things like contemplating death, things like the practice of cultivating gratitude.

All the things that that spiritual traditions tell us we should do and offer us practices to do. That's what I mean by spiritual technology. 

[00:09:34] Chris Duffy: 

So, can you just give us an example of some of these spiritual technologies? Some of these spiritual technologies are really about the biggest things that we struggle with that the secular world doesn't have a lot of answers to.

Like how do you deal with grief? How do you deal with suffering? How do you make meaning? 

[00:09:50] David DeSteno: 

Yeah, exactly. Um, let's start with grief. I think, you know, that's one that, that cuts across life. No matter who you are, at some point in your life, you're gonna lose people that you love. And the first thing that almost every spiritual tradition does is we eulogize the person who has passed.

And it seems normal 'cause we all do it. But if you think about it, it's kind of weird, right? Because if I just lost a job that I love or if I, if my wife, who I love just left me, I wouldn't wanna spend my time perseverating on, on the job I loved, or my wife that left me because the pain would be worse, right?

People wanna distract themselves. But what science has shown time and again, is that one of the things that helps people the most in terms of grief is consolidating a positive memory of the person who has passed. And so what eulogizing does is the process for exactly that. That is one of the biggest predictors of moving through grief.

And one of my favorite rituals that I point out is the Jewish process of sitting shiva. I wasn't raised Jewish, I was raised Catholic. And so when to me exploring this was amazing. When someone passes, the community comes together. It's, it's not optional. It's like, it's not like, “Oh, should I go and see this person?”

It's a commandment. You must go and the community comes together and for seven days people are with the mourners. Most of the time what they will do is they will pray and they will sing together. One of the things we know that predicts compassion and empathy for other people is something that's called synchronous action.

That is, I bring people into my lab and I have them listen to stuff on earphones, tones on earphones, and I have them move their arms to those tones. We then, through a whole series of shenanigans, make one person get stuck with a, with an awful problem. And if people had moved their arms in time with these other people.

They feel more compassion for them. Even though they don't know them from Adam, they feel more connected to them and they go out of their way. And so that's what happens here. People cover their mirrors when they're mourning. When you're sitting shiva and you see this s Hindu ceremonies as well as in Irish Catholic wakes, it seems kinda weird.

Why would you cover your mirror? Well, one thing we know from science is that when you look into a mirror, it amplifies whatever emotion you're feeling. And so if you're feeling grief, every time you look at yourself in the mirror, it's gonna amplify that grief. And so covering, covering those mirrors helps you deal with it and on and on it goes.

Because the trick with grief is not to deny it, it's to move through it without it becoming too intense or going on too long. And so as I sat there and I began to unpack these things as a scientist, it became clear to me that. A lot of these problems have not been solved, but that, that there are beautiful packages that are put together to help people.

[00:12:43] Chris Duffy: 

One of the things that I have found so meaningful in sitting shiva when I have been with friends who've lost family members is quite literally the sitting 'cause it is awkward, right? Someone is suffering and you don't want know exactly what to say, but to realize that your job is not to go and make them feel better, your job is not to necessarily even say anything.

Your job is to be there in the room sitting with them. So, that they're not alone and you bring them food. And those two things I think give such a purpose to the visitors. 

[00:13:12] David DeSteno: 

You're making an excellent point and thank you for reminding me of something. One of the other biggest predictors of helping people move through grief is something called instrumental help.

Instrumental support, and what that is, it basically means showing up and being there, right? It doesn't mean sending a message on Facebook or sending a card. It means providing food, providing support, doing what's needed. That alone, people who have that move through grief in, in a much more supportive way.

I was raised Catholic and we had a funeral and it was nice, and we had the eulogizing element, which helped, but there wasn't this additional element during those first week or so when the pain is really there. 

[00:13:53] Chris Duffy: 

I, I think that one of the things that came up for me as I was thinking about this interview is how my own personal background, my dad is Christian, my mom is Jewish.

They are in a way that I've, since learned is kind of a little unusual. They are both observant, but as a result of that, growing up with two people who love each other and don't agree on all of the things, but still have a ton of mutual respect for each other and don't view it as like, I have to convince this other person.

My framework for spirituality and religion has always been that there's so much that you can personally get out of it, and it's okay to not know all of the answers for sure. And that there's a real hubris to thinking like, not only do I know all the answers, but you have it wrong. I think my parents, because of that, I've, I always come into this with, well take what works for you and there's something really powerful about finding something that works for you.

But you don't have to know for other people too. That's my personal framework for experiencing religion and spirituality. 

[00:14:54] David DeSteno: 

One of my favorite sayings here is, is and, and it's kind of apocryphal, who knows if he actually said it or not, but it's attributed to the Buddha and it goes something like this. I don't have the exact words.

It's like, “Don't do or believe stuff that I'm saying because I'm saying it. Try it and see if it works for you.” And I think that's what we're tending to talk about here. You know, it, it's funny, oftentimes I'm my, I'm, we call my show How God Works. One of the problems with that is people think it's like, you know, a religious show.

I'm gonna be proselytizing to you. It may be a too cute title by half. But the idea is really, is really how does God work? How does spirituality work for people? And I think we're all on that journey. Yes, I'm a scientist. Yes, I can unpack for you how the science works, but every episode is a revelation for me by talking to people and, and, and putting those pieces together.

And I think having that mindset, like you're saying that different things work for different people and we don't have to judge what is the ultimate truth, what is ultimately correct, because ultimately if there is a God, none of us really knows and or can comprehend what that is. And so having that open respect, I think is the way that we can accomplish things.

And what I tell scientists is, “Look. You don't have to give up the scientific method. Lord knows the scientific method is one of the greatest things ever created to help us understand things.” Science is always self-correcting, right? There are lots of things that we believed were true that we now know or not, and I'm sure there are lots of things that we believed today that we're gonna find out were wrong.

30 years ago, if a physicist talked about some of the ideas that we now know to be true in terms of quantum mechanics. People would've laughed at them like, “That's insane. How could you think?” Something like that. And so my argument is, you know, let's have the humility that, that there are unknowns and we don't know what they are, and we should be careful about that.

I've been doing science long enough to know that lots of things change over time. And if we assume that we know everything. Then we're blinding ourselves to possibility. I mean, even Richard Dawkins, right? One of the world's most famous atheists will tell you when push comes to shove, that he can't be absolutely sure that God doesn't exist.

Getting into that debate, I think distracts us from the real work to be done here.

[00:17:15] Chris Duffy: 

We are gonna take a quick break. We will be right back after this.

And we are back. Here's a clip from David's podcast, How God Works. 

[00:17:36] David DeSteno: 

Anger, stress, isolation, despair. Over the past decade they've all been on the rise in the US. Last year on the show, we talked about how this trend is affecting young adults, but it isn't only young adults whose wellbeing has taken a nosedive.

Something deeper is going on. And it's tearing at the fabric of the United States. We're talking past each other, seeing enemies, where we should be seeing partners. And as a nation, we're feeling alone and hopeless at record levels. If things keep going in this direction, we risk leaving in irreparable hole in our private, public, and even political life.

How did we get here? And how do we fix it? While there's no one easy answer to either of those questions, I think spirituality plays a role in both. For thousands of years, it's helped us look inward and find kindness, connection, meaning, and joy, all things that have been on the decline and that we could use more of to tackle the problems we're facing today.

So what's the way forward? 

[00:18:48] Chris Duffy: 

In listening to David's podcast and reading his book, one idea kept coming back up for me, which is that so many people have been pushed away from religion and away from faith because of real documented and terrible abuses of power by organized religions. So many people have this immediate aversion to any sort of engagement with the idea of God because of all those negatives throughout history and those that are ongoing.

So I asked David how he thinks about that when it comes to his work. 

[00:19:17] David DeSteno: 

I think it, it hearkens back to this idea of, one of the parts of religion are spiritual technologies. Any technology can be used for good or for bad. It depends upon the intentions of the people using it. So if religion can move hearts and minds, it can do that to help people live better lives.

Or it can be a powerful force by people in power to maintain that power or to garner more of it. And you know, we see that time and again, I, it's more the case when you look at a lot of conflict and wars through history, it's not the case that most of them are fought about religion. I mean, the majority is that the cause of the wars have to do with desires for land, power and resources, and people use religion.

To marshal support and marshal fervor. But the same is true of science, right? I mean, science. Look, right now the, the technologies that we have from science can be used for the greatest of purposes. Look at the vaccine development. Look how it helped us deal with Covid and other diseases. I. But it's also technology that allows us to build weapons of mass destruction and to kill people in a much more efficient way than we could before.

And so I think like everything else, we have to separate the idea of religion, spirituality from the organizations that often use it, many of which have had terrible moral failures. 

[00:20:43] Chris Duffy: 

Kind of moving a away from that for a second. You've been working on this for years, for decades. I think from my perspective, the last five years have been a real noticeable difference in the way that the world approaches these questions of spirituality, of meaning, of grief and of suffering.

I think there's been, because there's been this collective pain and trauma of the pandemic, and especially for young people who missed out on the rituals of graduation, you know, becoming a teenager or you know, graduating from elementary school into middle school. All of these things that are these real like markers, these rituals of life because they were taken away.

And then on top of that, there was this existential fear of, am I going to die? Are the people that I love going to die? And for millions of people, the answer was yes. People did die close to you. There's all of a sudden this, I feel, this acute vacuum of where do we turn and how do we find answers to this?

I wonder if you could address the people who are listening to the show, who are young, who have missed out on some of these big milestones and dealt with so much of this grief at really formative times in their life, how your work informs, uh, ways for them to go forward and to heal. 

[00:22:04] David DeSteno: 

Sure. What happened during the pandemic was suddenly death became possible for most people, right? If you're in your twenties, and if you're a teenager, death is something that's far away. I mean, yes, young people tragically die, but for most people it's not something you think about. But when the pandemic was happening, the shadow of death was close for everyone and what happened, right?

One of the things that happened was, I remember the idea of the great resignation. People were just quitting their jobs and they were reevaluating their life and they were looking for ways to find meaning and happiness. And you know, one of the things that right psychological research tells us is that focusing on your career, yeah.

It's important. Yeah. You need to kind of, you know, have enough money that, that you can live well and, and have your resources. Have your needs taken care of. But what really brings happiness is connection with other people. Service finding meaning and purpose in, in something that, that you do. If you look at how happiness changes over the lifespan, it typically bottoms out around 50 and then starts to go up again. 

Why does it go up again? It's because people pivot to their concerns as they're approaching the end of their life to focus on the things that really bring happiness, connection with others, service, generosity. During the pandemic, suddenly our, our time to our death was close for everyone.

That possibility, and it made us reevaluate things. Every spiritual tradition that I can find, urges people to contemplate your death regularly. Not in a morbid way, not to dwell on it, but to realize that life is ephemeral tomorrow. You may not be here. And psychologically we know when we do that, if we just bring people into a lab and ask them to do that, suddenly what they value.

Changes. It becomes less selfish and self-focused and more other focused. And we also know that brings more happiness. And so I think there, one of the pieces of advice from spiritual traditions about contemplating death is important when you're trying to decide what direction do you want to go in life.

Another thing is, is hope, right? Right now, hopelessness is kind of at a peak, especially among the younger generation, I mean, we're facing things like climate change, gun violence, the loss, as you said, of many of these rituals like, um, graduation that are due to the pandemic. How do you have hope? When times are dark and here there's this wonderful idea coming out of the Buddhist tradition called wise hope.

What is wise hope? It means accepting that the world may not be exactly as as you want it to be, but hope itself is an act of resistance. Hope itself is an act of doing what you can just in case everything will work out okay rather than turning away and giving up. And the important thing there is, you know, if you're just optimistic, oh, things are gonna be fine.

When something doesn't go your way, it kind of dulls your motivation. It kind of makes you believe, ah, that's it. We're all going to hell. But if you reconceptualize hope in this Buddhist sense of wise hope it is every act you do is an act of living your morality and finding meaning and contributing to the world, becoming the way you want, even if it's not looking that way.

And that helps people keep going. And so I think it's ideas like that matter and you know, people, as you said, are leaving mainstream religions in droves, and I think it's because they're feeling, they don't speak to them in some ways. There are debates about, you know, gender disparities and, and welcoming, welcoming people from different communities.

But those are all just organizational, institutional things. And when people leave these traditions, it's not that they're becoming hardcore atheists. They're looking for new ways to be spiritual, and I think that's why it's in these deeper practices, that they can actually find new ways to make meaning.

[00:26:02] Chris Duffy: 

And I think that finding the hope part is really hard. I think that is the active work and the challenge. And so when you were like, and how do you find hope? I I, I had to stop myself from going, like, how do you find hope? How do you do it? Because it, it's really tough. I, I'd love to have you talk about, I know that you've done research with Daniel Lim about loss and adversity and how those can affect people later on. So I, I'd love to have you talk about that, which I think is very related. 

[00:26:25] David DeSteno: 

So Dan Lim was a student of mine who's now a, a professor in Singapore. And one question he had is, you know, what happens when people face adversity in life? You know, does it harden your heart or does it warm it?

And truth is, it can do both, but on average it tends to warm people's hearts. And so in a lot of work that Dan led. What we found is that people who had experienced adversity, you know, loss of loved ones, natural disasters, economic hardship, when we presented them with opportunities to help other people, and you know, this is the thing that we do in our work, right?

We don't ask people, would you help someone? Are you compassionate? I mean, what are you gonna say? No. Right. But I, I think most people, and it's not that most people would lie, I think we often predict we'll do certain things that when push comes to shove, we don't. And so, you know, we create situations where we put actors out who are looking like they're in need for help, and we see who helps them.

What we found is that people who had faced adversity were much more likely to feel compassion for others who were suffering and to come to their aid. And the key to it all was whether or not they felt that they could be efficacious. That is, is do small acts matter to the extent that they believed even small acts matter, they were willing to act on it and to help these people. 

Which, which is why this idea, and I, I should say this idea of Wise hopes comes from Roshi Joan Halifax, who's a internationally known Buddhist teacher. It's recognizing that it is the act itself that matters, not the outcome. If you're attached to the outcome and you try a few times and you don't get the outcome you want, people tend to give up, right?

Why am I gonna persevere? But if the act itself is what we value. Then it's easier to persevere. But you know, one of the, let me give you an example of a, of a technology and practice. You know, for thousands of years, the idea behind meditation was that it would help ease suffering yours and other people's.

Nobody ever looked at that before. And so what we decided to do was to actually bring people into the lab, have them sit at the foot of a Buddhist llama and do meditation practice for eight weeks. After that, we sent them out and they came back to the lab and we had, to make a long story short, we had an actor who was on crutches and had their foot in a foot boot, so it looked like they were in pain.

[00:28:40] Chris Duffy: 

I love this. This anecdote is so. 

[00:28:42] David DeSteno: 

Yeah. 

[00:28:42] Chris Duffy: 

Such a great, beautiful experiment because it's so, it's first of all such a, an elegant way of testing it, but also it sounds like it'd be so fun to be the actor. 

[00:28:51] David DeSteno: 

I always tell my students, I, my, my, the students who work in my lab, “I'm training you to be good scientists or con people.” But. Anyway. Let's hope it's let's, it's the former. 

[00:28:57] Chris Duffy: 

So you see this actor comes in on crutches. They look, they're very uncomfortable. They're kind of like sighing as they lean against a wall in pain. 

[00:29:03] David DeSteno: 

Right. Exactly. They come into a room, we have three chairs in the room. We have two of the chairs occupied by other actors who are just told to kind of look at your smartphone and don't pay attention to the person who's in pain. 

This person, actor comes in on crutches, looking like they're in pain, who's sitting in the third chair? One of the subjects from our study who either either had meditated for eight weeks or, or didn't. What we simply did is count the number of people who did, decided to get up and try and help that person and give them their chair or see if they could ease their pain in any way among those who didn't meditate.

It was about 15% of people, among those who meditated, it was 50% of people. Right. And we've replicated this and other labs have done this. And so we, we believe the finding that simple act of meditation for eight weeks tripled the percentage of people who were willing to come to the aid of another person in pain.

And that's what meditation is supposed to do, right? That's the theology behind it. And so here's scientific proof that it does it. We've done work since then that shows when people kind of insult you, it makes you less willing to kind of lash out against them. Yes, you want to tell them what they did was wrong, but you don't engage in escalating violence.

And so it's, it's things like this that show us there is a truth to these practices. You know, we have these experiments where you can come in and we let you flip a coin on a computer screen and if it's heads, you get four times the amount of money as if it's tails, and you believe that there's no way that we'll know what you do.

We leave you alone. Of course, we have the whole thing rigged so we know what comes up. It's gonna be tails, but we ask you to report to us whether it was head or tails, and you know, we'll find that, you know, depending upon the experiment, 25, 30% of people will cheat. They'll say, “Oh yeah, I got heads. Gimme the extra money.”

But we know they got tails. But if we have them count their blessings first. It drops to like 2%, right? It's almost gone. And we know in other experiments that when people feel grateful, they are more likely to help others. They become more honest, they become more generous. What does every spiritual tradition do?

It has prayers of gratitude that are to be said regularly and to cultivate this. 

[00:31:11] Chris Duffy: 

When we think about faith and we think about belief, there's the religious piece of belief, of course, but there's also just the fact that we believe in things all the time that we don't necessarily understand and, and I think you have a really interesting take on placebos and the placebo effect, which is often framed as, oh, well the sugar pills are just fake, so the placebo effect is nothing.

Whereas you take it in this way. That I think is so interesting and important, which is that the placebo effect is proof that an inert pill, a pill that has no actual mechanism for changing your body can make these very replicable changes in the way that we feel and experience the world. But you also have some lines on like what that can and can't do.

So can you talk to us about placebo effect? 

[00:31:57] David DeSteno: 

Physicians have been using placebos for thousands of years. We all know that if you, uh, give someone a pill and you say, “This is going to cure.” Whatever, some things that can help, you know, some things that certainly can't. You know, I no way am I advocating don't go to your physician, please go to your physician.

But in, in some ways there have been benefits in terms of pain and other types of responses from placebos. But what I find really amazing about the new work is there's new work on what are called open placebos. That is even when you tell people. “This is a placebo. This is not going to do anything.” 

[00:32:32] Chris Duffy: 

Mm. 

[00:32:32] David DeSteno: 

I mean, it has it, it's inert, it is sugar, and they take it.

It's been shown to have beneficial effects. If there is some type of ritual around it. That is if you have a sense of connection with the person who's giving it to you. If sometimes, sometimes people will kind of wrap a magic blanket around themselves or say a few magic words or do something, even though they know these things aren't doing anything, it intensifies the effect.

And what we're seeing here is just the simple ability of belief in some ways and the ritual aspects of these help make meaning of it can help us even physically heal ourselves. And to me, right. That's some of the greatest power that we've seen in healing ceremonies. You know, I was talking to, to someone who studied the placebo effect and he went to South America and he, his knee was hurting him and he had a shaman work on his knee and he said, “I know this isn't gonna do a damn thing.” But when he went home that night, he said it hurt less.

And he couldn't deny it. Understanding how these ritualistic practices work, non-consciously on our mind is hugely important. 

[00:33:49] Chris Duffy: 

It feels also really relevant to say that, you know, if you have a broken bone and you take a placebo, uh, it's not gonna set the bone of course, right? 

[00:33:58] David DeSteno: 

Mm-Hmm. 

[00:33:58] Chris Duffy: 

And it's not gonna shrink the tumor or necessarily it's not gonna solve these problems.

And I think sometimes people get too far in the brain body connection. 

[00:34:05] David DeSteno: 

Mm-Hmm. 

[00:34:06] Chris Duffy: 

But. I think people are also too dismissive of the idea that your experience of the condition, that your anxiety, that your pain, that your mental functioning, that those can't be improved by a placebo, even as you said, an open placebo.

That dismissal of that connection is really doing a disservice to patients and to people who are suffering because it is a very real change in their suffering. 

[00:34:28] David DeSteno: 

It is. And you know, one thing that, that we're recognizing more and more now about the brain isn't reactive, the brain is predictive. That is, the brain is trying to predict.

What's going to happen to the body next and try and prepare you for that. And so to the extent that you can alter the brain's predictions, even in a non-conscious way, even by kind of queuing ideas, right? That you know, this is in the old days it was called the power of suggestion. Now in psychology, we call it priming or shaping.

It changes its predictions, and if the brain predictions are changed, then your experience will change. But it's also, in some cases, you know, a lot of these spiritual practices was whether you are, you know, praying the rosary or chanting cureton in in, in Hindu, or engaging in certain types of meditative breathing, you're also directly working on the body, right?

What we know is that when you recite prayers or chant cureton, or do some of these things, it tends to center people's breathing rate at about six breaths per minute. And so in many ways, you know, these practices have built into them suggestive ways, like through the placebo effect to alter the brain's predictions about what's gonna happen to your body, but also direct ways to manipulate what the brain is sensing by changing your body's breathing rates and other things. 

[00:35:51] Chris Duffy: 

When I think about the big questions, right, like the meaning of life or how to be a better human or how God works, right? All of these things, really, so much of it comes down for me to making it less about you and more about how you can be of service to others.

And I think that like the idea that a meditation practice actually can help you to be more compassionate to others, rather than just being about your own productivity or your own, you know, I think sometimes the western interpretation of meditation has become very self-focused, and so it's, it's refreshing to hear about it as a, a way of helping you to be a more positive force in the world to, to approach the world with more empathy and compassion.

[00:36:29] David DeSteno: 

Well, that's the problem now, right? I mean, if you go to corporate America. People are like, “How many hours did you meditate? I'm a better meditator than you.” And it's, that's the whole idea is not, is wrong, you know? So, yeah.

[00:36:39] Chris Duffy: 

And then I also wanna say just as a, an important disclaimer for people who don't, aren't familiar with your career, that when you found that meditation could help pe people to avoid revenge and escalating violence, a huge important piece of that is that you are working in Boston, and if you can avoid escalating violence in Boston, you can avoid it anywhere.

[00:37:00] David DeSteno: 

I, I see you've driven here. No, it's true. 

[00:37:02] Chris Duffy: 

Oh, yes. I lived in Boston for many years 

[00:37:04] David DeSteno: 

When this study came out showing that meditation made people kinder. I wrote a piece about it for the New York Times and I, they showed me a letter to the editor that they published, which came from this nice gentleman from the south, and he said.

“You people in Boston don't need meditation. You need manners.” I thought it won't be, he's got something there. Yeah. 

[00:37:21] Chris Duffy: 

Well, David DeSteno, thank you so much for being on the show and thank you for your book and your podcast, how God works. I really am a huge fan. I think it's really important. So thank you.

[00:37:28] David DeSteno: 

Thank you for having me. Chris is my, my pleasure and honor to be on.

[00:37:35] Chris Duffy: 

That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, David DeSteno. His book and his podcast are both called How God Works. I am your host. Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by sweet, perfect angels, Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks, Lanie Lott, Antonia Le and Joseph DeBrine.

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