Something You Should Know
Are Your Genes Secretly Controlling Your Behavior? & How to Truly Flourish
23 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How do we make snap judgments about trustworthiness?
Today on Something You Should Know, the fascinating and somewhat unreliable way we decide who is and isn't trustworthy. Then, what causes good people to do bad things?
I think we've all had a situation where we've done something and then later we're like, what was I thinking there? Why did I do that? How could I have done this thing that I've come to regret?
Also, what's the purpose of that little tiny pocket inside the front pocket of your blue jeans? And how to build meaning, joy, and fulfillment into your life.
It's not about intensity of experience. It's about the frequency of them. So those little interactions when you're giving the thumbs up to the fire engine going by end up being way more impactful on the quality of your life and your well-being than seeking out some really intense mountaintop experience.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Chapter 2: What role do genetics play in influencing behavior?
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Listen to Vulgar History, Regency era, wherever you get podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
So how long do you think it takes for you to decide if someone looks trustworthy? You're never going to get this. Hi, welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. I'm Mike Carruthers. And the answer to the question how long it takes for you to decide if someone looks trustworthy is about a tenth of a second.
Psychologists have found that when you see a new face, your brain instantly forms impressions about traits like trustworthiness and competence. And those snap judgments can have real consequences.
In one study analyzing murder trials, defendants whose faces were rated as less trustworthy looking were significantly more likely to receive the death penalty than those whose faces appeared more trustworthy.
What's even more surprising is that scientists can now use computer models to predict which faces people will judge as trustworthy, based purely on subtle features like eyebrow shape, eye openness, mouth curvature. And those characteristics have pretty much nothing to do with whether someone is actually trustworthy.
In other words, your brain may make a confident judgment about someone long before it has any evidence to do so. And that is something you should know. Why do people do bad things? Why are some people more prone to addiction, violence, or antisocial behavior than other people?
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Chapter 3: What does it mean to truly flourish in life?
Is it something in their upbringing, or their environment, or their relationships? Or could part of the answer be written into their DNA? And if biology does play a role, that raises some difficult questions. How much control do people actually have over their behavior?
Chapter 4: Can anyone learn to build a life filled with meaning and joy?
How should society respond to wrongdoing? Is punishment the right answer, or are there better ways to deal with people who may be predisposed to certain behaviors? My guest has spent years exploring these uncomfortable but fascinating questions. Katherine Page Harden is one of the world's leading scientists studying how genetics influences difference in temperament, temptation, and behavior.
She's author of a book called Original Sin on the genetics of vice, the problem of blame, and the future of forgiveness. Hi, Katherine. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks for having me.
Sure. So first, can you explain your interest in this topic and what it is you do?
So I'm interested in this topic scientifically because I'm a clinical psychologist and I run a research lab where we're looking at genetics of human behavior. And we're particularly interested in behaviors that are considered wrong, that are considered immoral. So aggression, fighting, bullying, lying, or behaviors that might be considered wrong, like becoming addicted to alcohol or drugs.
And we're beginning to find specific genes that significantly increase a child's likelihood of growing up to show one of these behaviors. And we can talk about that from a scientific perspective. This gene increases your likelihood of becoming aggressive by the time you're 30. But again, these behaviors are also seen in a moral sense. And so what I'm interested in now is how do we put together
the scientific work with people's intuitions about how do we respond when people have done something really wrong.
And so what determines Because you often hear people, you'll see it on the news, they'll interview somebody who did something horrible and they'll say something to the effect of, I couldn't help myself. Well, yeah, you could. You could have not done that, but you did that. Or is it not a choice? And why do some people do such terrible things and other people say, well, I could never do that?
So I got a letter from someone who's in prison in Texas. He's been there since he was 16. And he's in prison because he committed a really violent sexual crime that, you know, a very horrible thing. And he did it when he was a teenager, 15, 16 years old. And he learned about my lab from an article in Texas Monthly Magazine. And he wrote to me and he said, why would I do this?
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Chapter 5: What habits and mindsets contribute to flourishing?
also pulled into the army as children. A Norwegian man, Anders Breivik, who committed one of the worst mass murders in Norwegian history, but also who clearly struggled with serious mental health problems and a bad childhood environment his whole life. And these are really extreme examples, but they're examples in which obviously something horrible has been done.
And also, if we look at the developmental histories of the lives of these people, this violence didn't come out of nowhere, right? They're responding to really extreme events in their, both their biology and in their upbringing. And what you see in these communities are actions in which they both are saying, We're not going to ignore that this happened.
That's not obviously, no one's suggesting that that's on the table, that there's no consequences at all. But they do, for instance, in the case of Norway, incarcerate them in situations where they have lots of access to mental health treatment. There's a strong emphasis on rehabilitation.
Chapter 6: How can community impact individual flourishing?
And there isn't this, again, incredibly harsh, punitive element where it's really about making that person suffer as much as possible. That's a really radical thing to imagine as an American. But it is, I think, a really compelling example of how people have maintained cooperative norms while also honoring that this even the perpetrator is also a person.
And this violence didn't come out of nowhere. They were shaped by so many factors beyond their control.
Well, that's fair, but I think what people are often concerned about is if somebody has done something horrific...
They need to be removed from society in a way that they don't get to do that again, that they need to be locked up somewhere, that there's that feeling that this person has proven they can't be trusted, so let's put them in a place where we can keep our eye on them, so to speak, at least for a while, so that that doesn't happen again.
And I think that that intuition is correct in the sense that, again, we live in a community and our obligation is to protect each other. We do have responsibilities for each other. This is where I differ from some other scientists that think that because behavior is determined by factors beyond our control, it's that science is sort of rendered moral responsibility obsolete.
I don't agree with that. But I also think that if you look at the conditions of an average American jail or prison right now, you'd be hard pressed to say that the only thing that's happening there is that we're protecting America or American society from perpetrators. We're also deliberately making people hurt for a very, very long time.
And that retribution is different from how do we keep each other safe?
What about when you're dealing with someone who does something horrible, commits a crime, a serious crime, and they have no remorse? They're psychopaths. There's no feeling there. Well, then what?
We have studied children like that in my lab where they show not just aggression, but lack of remorse around it. They might even enjoy aggressing against other children. And I think that's an example of behavior that, one, doesn't respond very well to punishment. So punishing those children doesn't usually make them aggressive.
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Chapter 7: How should society address wrongdoing influenced by biology?
It's been accompanied by a decline in risk taking across the board. So murder rates are down. Teenage pregnancy is down. Smoking cigarettes is down. Generally speaking, in the U.S., people are behaving in much more controlled, less disinhibited ways across the board. And we can see that even at the extremes.
And is it that people are just doing less risky behavior or they're acting more responsibly? And maybe those two things are the same thing, but they're not really the same thing.
They're not really the same thing. Are they acting more responsibly? I think responsible is a harder concept to define scientifically. They're certainly engaging in less risk-taking. Now, it might be that they're engaging in less risk-taking. And this is one theory. It hasn't been. This isn't dispositive.
But one hypothesis is that they're engaging in less risk-taking because they're also just around people less and spending a lot more time at home with their phones. And that might be good from the perspective of risk-taking and antisocial behavior, but not great from the perspective of mental health more broadly if you've just substituted risk-taking for social isolation. So
How we understand these broad historical trends is difficult. What's interesting to me about that from a perspective as a behavioral geneticist is that Americans' genes haven't changed in the last 30 years. That's not nearly enough time for us to have evolved differently in that period of time.
So it's another piece of evidence that even though there is a genetic component to risk-taking, to antisocial behavior, to aggression, to violence, that genetic component is not deterministic because we are seeing it change even in this short period of time. It seems to be also really responding to the social environment that a child is developing in.
I think there's an assumption. Maybe it's just my assumption. But when you see someone who has done some horrible crime, you think they must have had a very difficult childhood. They must have been bullied. The home life must have been horrible. Are there cases where you look back at someone who's done something horrible and you can't find any of that?
That they had a perfectly normal upbringing and and something completely inexplicable went wrong.
I think an example of this that people from my generation will remember is the Columbine shooters. So this was one of the first mass shootings in America in 1999, Columbine High School in Colorado. And the writer Andrew Solomon wrote in his book, Far From the Tree, a profile of the parents of one of the school shooters.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of small daily interactions for well-being?
It's not that simple. I've been speaking with Catherine Harden. She's one of the leading scientists examining how DNA shapes differences in temperament and temptation and behavior. And her book is called Original Sin on the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Catherine, thanks so much for sharing this.
I appreciate it. Thank you for the opportunity.
Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and, of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen.
If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, The Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at LongestShortestTime.com.
Here's a word I know you know, but don't use very often. Flourish. It's a great word. In fact, just saying it sounds so positive. Flourish. And when you think about it, what could be better than that? If someone is flourishing, it must mean life is going well. Not just surviving or getting by, but actually... Flourishing. But what does it mean to flourish? And more importantly, how do you do it?
Is flourishing something that just happens to lucky people? Or is it something you can intentionally build into your life? Well, that's what my guest is here to talk about. Daniel Coyle is the author of several bestselling books and has advised high-performing organizations like the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, and Google.
His latest book is called Flourish, The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. Hey, Daniel, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hey, Mike, thanks for having me. Good to be with you. So I have a pretty good idea what flourish means, you know, the dictionary definition. But what does it mean to you?
You know, it's joyful, meaningful growth shared.
it's sort of like you know thriving but more generative right you're like creating something new and it's the feeling of aliveness i think in a way when we think of that joyful meaningful growth when we think about our life um it's it's more than success you know it's more than fulfillment but it's sort of like the peak that life has to offer us the peak experience that life has to offer us
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