Emily Falk

And when we point out these things that we wish other people were doing differently, the things that are most salient for them are all the things that they're already juggling, just like you said.

You know, with my grandmother, I was juggling a lot of different things having to do with my work and my kids and getting dinner on the table.

And those things were front of mind for me.

And so when we point out the ways that other people could be improving their health behaviors, you know, choosing healthier activities, quitting smoking, drinking less, drinking

getting more exercise or studying harder or, you know, making choices that are different than the choices that they're making, that really can feel threatening.

It can threaten our self-image.

It can threaten our sense that we're making good choices.

I mean that our brain has these systems that help us think about what's good and bad, our value system, and brain systems that help us think about what's me and not me, which I call our self-relevance system.

And the self-relevance and value systems are really intertwined with one another.

So when we make decisions about what's good and bad, it's tapping into the value system, but that's overlapping with our self-relevance system.

And so...

Those kinds of decisions are conflated with one another to the degree that we tend to have these biases where we think of things that are me typically on average as being good and things that are not me as being on average bad.

We also have optimism biases where we think of ourselves as being above average, like more than 50% of people think that they're an above average driver.

And so when you say, well, you know, you might not be an above average driver.

You're actually like pretty risky driver, pretty dangerous driver.

People don't say, oh, thank you.

Like, I'm so glad that you pointed that out.

Now I'll go and like get some lessons so that I can be less of a danger to myself and other people on the road.

There's the old comedy bit about how people who are driving faster than you are maniacs and people who are driving slower than you are are, you know, super stodgy.

And of course, you're driving at exactly the right speed.