The Last Show with David Cooper
Sam Johnson: Dead And Decision Making - January 26, 2026
27 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is dread and how does it affect our lives?
Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper. We spend our lives waiting with dread for test results, for job offers, for health updates, even bad news. And it turns out the waiting itself is often the worst part. Dread can hijack our choices, our patience, and our sense of control. It can affect how we make decisions.
I'm here with someone who's researched this. His name is Sam Johnson. He's a cognitive science professor at the University of Waterloo. Sam, welcome to the show. Great to be here, David. Thanks. I just gave a crude overview of what I think dread is. But when you go and study this stuff, you've got to like really define it. And you're a cognitive scientist.
Chapter 2: How does waiting for bad news impact our decision-making?
What do you mean when you say dread? Is it anxiety? Is it fear? Is it stress? Is it something more specific than that?
It's all of the above, actually, David. So the way that we think about dread is any kind of negative feelings that you have about things that haven't happened yet. So we can separate out that definition, though, which is kind of the way that we think about this, from what we're actually doing when we measure it.
And when we're measuring this, what we're really doing is seeing, OK, for people who are going to expect to be financially worse off in the next year, To what extent does that affect their current well-being? For people who think that they're going to be better off in the next year, to what extent does that affect their current well-being?
And it turns out that thinking that you're going to be financially worse off in the next year is a much bigger deal than thinking that you're going to be financially better off in the next year.
Interesting. And it has no bearing on what your finances will be. It's just that stage when you could have bad news, this dread stage.
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Chapter 3: What does cognitive science say about the nature of dread?
What does it do to our well-being?
Well, we know that it can produce kind of negative emotional consequences in the present time. So when we're dreading something that's going to happen in the future, we can start to ruminate about that thing, we can focus on that thing, and it can crowd out other thoughts that we might be having in the meantime.
But I think what the research is really showing is less about what are the kind of negative consequences consequences in the moment, but more about the way that shapes the decisions that we make about the future.
So how does a period of dread ahead of me shape how I'm going to decide things in the future? That is really interesting.
Yeah, so two main things that we found. So the first thing has to do with risk, and the second thing has to do with time. So the thing to do with risk is that people vary in the extent to which dread is a more powerful emotion than savoring. Savoring is kind of the opposite, where you are looking forward to things that can happen, to positive things that can happen in the future.
For some people, dread is just a much more powerful emotion than savoring. And for those people, they tend to avoid taking risks where the risk is something that they'd have to take A decision that I have to make now about something that's going to happen in the future. So the risk could be resolved in the future.
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Chapter 4: How does dread influence our perception of risk?
So give me a more specific example of how, let's say I'm going to I'm waiting next year for some financial outcome. It could go very badly. How and maybe I do I need to take risks? Is that OK? What would be a specific example?
Yeah, so if you think about the type of person who is really focused on financial risks, those types of people might be very unlikely to start businesses, for example, because it's the type of thing where it's going to be potentially months or years before you find out what the outcome is going to be.
And when you're kind of ruminating or focusing on those sorts of negative emotions about the present, then it makes you think, okay, maybe this risk isn't something that I want to take. Whereas people who have a more balanced attitude where they think, okay, there's some positive things that might happen from starting this business. There's also some negative things.
Those people are more willing to take calculated risks.
And life is all about calculated risk. It's risky to apply for a job. It's risky to ask someone on a date. It's risky to invest your money in a fund that probably will give you good returns and people would think is sensible. And if you're just more averse to that stuff, you could, I don't know, your life could stay stagnant, I suppose.
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Chapter 5: In what ways does dread affect our patience and decision-making?
Yeah, absolutely. I think that it is true that people who are particularly prone to dread are likely to miss out on some of those opportunities.
Alright, so that's one kind of thing.
Yeah, that's the first thing.
Okay, and the second one?
The second thing is that people who are more prone to dread also tend to be more impatient. So if you imagine you needed to have some sort of painful dental procedure, say. So the kind of typical way of thinking about this in mainstream economics is that people want to put things off as long as possible if it's unpleasant.
That's actually in my head. I was imagining having to do this dental surgery. I'm like, I'll do it next year.
Yeah, that's right. So the interesting thing is that people who are particularly prone to dread, they're more impatient for those types of things, meaning that they want to get over with sooner rather than later. And although that seems a little bit unintuitive at first, it actually kind of makes sense.
So if you're the type of person who is likely to be focused on this dental procedure for the next three months, you might think like, oh God, I'm not going to have anything else in my mind other than like all this pain for the next three months.
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Chapter 6: What are the emotional consequences of anticipating negative outcomes?
You'd rather just get it over with tomorrow. So it's a little bit of a counterintuitive consequence of being more dread filled.
Okay, so if you got a lot of dread, you on the one hand are like, I don't know, you avoid taking risks. On the other hand, if you know something bad's coming up, you're like, get it over with quickly. Your behavior's modified. Why do you think this anticipation of a bad outcome does so much to us? Why does it change us or why does it affect our behavior?
Yeah, so what we can say from the research is why dread is a more powerful emotion than savoring. So why negative things are so much more powerful than positive things. And basically the reason is that in the case of savoring something positive that's going to happen in the future, there's kind of a good part of it and a bad part of it at the same time.
So suppose that you were in a relationship and the person that you're in love with is going to be away for a month, say. Well, when they come back, maybe you'll do something really fun together with that person. Maybe you'll go out partying or something. So is that something you're going to savor? How much positive anticipation do you feel about that?
Chapter 7: Can mindfulness help us manage feelings of dread?
Well, on the one hand, yeah, it's nice thinking about this thing that's going to happen in a month. But on the other hand, you kind of want that thing to just happen now. So you're savoring it, which is a nice thing, but then you're also kind of impatient for it because you want it to happen now. In the case of dread, it's not really like that.
There's really nothing good about having a dental procedure that's going to happen in three months. We don't really take comfort in the fact that it's going to happen in the distant future to some other version of ourselves. We mostly just anticipate that we're going to feel a lot of dread about that.
So whereas thinking about positive things in the future is kind of mixed, thinking about negative things in the future is just really bad.
Is there an upside to dread? Like, I don't know, evolutionarily speaking, is there any reason why we might feel this way for things that we're dreading?
Probably. So this would be, of course, speculating wildly beyond our actual data. But it is probably true that feeling emotions like dread can help us to avoid. Yes, like it does help us to avoid calculated risks, like in the investment example that you gave earlier or starting a business like I was talking about.
but also probably helps you to avoid risks that really aren't a good idea for you to take on.
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Chapter 8: Is there a positive side to experiencing dread?
So it's probably this kind of catch-all mechanism that prevents us from making changes in the future. Some of them might be good, some of them might be bad. It's probably too big of a net.
If someone listening recognizes themselves and what we're talking about, they have some future event they're dreading and they're being avoidant, they're avoiding risk, whatever the impact it has, they hear us talking about it and they think that's me. Is there any way to change the behavior or is this just a stubborn thing that's wired into our brains?
I think so. So one thing that pops out in our data is that people who are more mindful, which is to say focused more on the present, tend to be less prone to this type of behavior and this type of pattern. So it's probably the case that we can cultivate mindfulness over a longer period of time.
So certainly there are things like mindfulness meditation that can help you to be more mindful in a particular moment. And it might be possible that by training ourselves to be more mindful, we can also regulate our feelings better around dread.
Sam Johnson is a cognitive science professor at the University of Waterloo. Sam, this has been a joy. Thanks for sharing your research with me in the show. Thank you, David.
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