#97: Three Things that got me thinking

+ 🥳 an announcement

Hello, thoughtful subscriber.

Big news: I’m launching a new project this Thursday! It will be a (separate) weekly newsletter about untangling the joyous mess of living in a multicultural family. That newsletter is for you if you’re raising multicultural kids, thinking about having them, or grew up in a mixed family. It’s for you if you want to explore the questions big and small that come up in mixed relationships and parenting.

If you’d like to receive it, reply to this email 🙋🏽and I’ll add you to the list 💌. SQUEE!

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And now, onto the Three Things that got me thinking about the reasons why we do the things we do:

1. Grandpa David

2. Positive vs. negative framing

3. Leaving Amazon

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1. ‘Challenging Mother Nature’

Last month, writer Rachel Handler published a Q&A with David, her late ‘grandpa-in-law’, about his decision to have a “voluntary assisted death” facility in Switzerland.

Who the hell wants to die? I don’t. I’ve had so much fun in my life! The places I’ve gone to, the things I’ve done. I love it. But I can’t enjoy it.

David speaks about his declining quality of life as the main reason for his decision; about the disapproval of medical doctors and the support of his family; his emotions—sadness, hurt, love, gratitude, no anger. I started picking more excerpts to share with you, but would rather encourage you to read the whole interview over at The Cut. It is moving, respectfully done, and has left me with more questions than answers.

Photo by Gert Stockmans on Unsplash

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2. Scary messages

During the COVID-19 pandemic (as in other situations), health messages urging people to adopt certain behaviours could be framed negatively (e.g. wear a mask to avoid losing your health and avoid endangering others) or positively (e.g. stay home to stay healthy and protect others). A big study, published in the journal Affective Science last month and spanning 84 countries, 16,000 participants and 48 languages¹, found that "message framing had little-to-no measurable benefit for behavioral intentions, policy attitudes, or information seeking, but did have a significant emotional cost in terms of increased [self-reported] anxiety."

Jennifer Lerner, one of the co-authors of the study and a professor of public policy, decision science, and management at Harvard Kennedy School, said in a press release last week:

These data imply that scaring citizens is not the answer. Public health advisories shouldn’t emphasize only the bad things that could happen from inaction; doing so in this case increased citizens’ anxiety without producing any benefit in behavior.

The anxiety part sounds a little self-evident; the no-benefit part, less so. The paper says previous health psychology research comparing actions associated with gains (e.g., wearing sunscreen to clear skin) vs. inaction associated with losses (e.g., not wearing sunscreen to skin cancer) has “yielded mixed results” so far.

There is at least one study, however, that used a reasonably comparable paradigm but which found divergent results: Abhyankar et al. (2008) found a loss-frame advantage on intentions to obtain the MMR vaccine for one’s child. It could be the case that the effects of loss- vs. gain-message framing differ when assessing health intentions for oneself vs. another person, especially when the other person is a child under one’s care. Additional possibilities include that there may be something specific about an unfolding (and highly uncertain) pandemic that blunted such effects or that the gain/loss manipulations were weaker in the present study.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

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3. Going indie

In February 2019, Daniel Vassallo left a high-paying software developer job to go indie. Apparently, things are going well for him (he sells online courses, an online membership for self-employed folks, and other products):

Daniel Vassallo @dvassallo

Today is the 3rd anniversary of my first dollar on Gumroad 🎉

In this Medium post titled “Only intrinsic motivation lasts”, he wrote about his initial reasons for leaving his “cushy job at Amazon after 8 years”: he wanted to do something that he could “consider satisfactory” if he kept doing it until 80 years old:

Despite getting rewarded repeatedly with promotions, compensation, recognition, and praise, I wasn’t motivated enough to do another year. […]

It would have been foolish of me to expect my motivation to start increasing if I got yet another promotion, or another compensation bump, or another big project. But there was something else that was trending down with my motivation. It was my freedom. […]

Rewards up, motivation down. Source

The things that don’t wear off are those that I’ve been doing since I was a kid, when nothing was forcing me to do them. Things such as writing code, selling my creations, charting my own path, calling it like I saw it. I know my strengths, and I know what motivates me, so why not do this all the time?

(With thanks to Anita at Worldwise for the tip!)

1. The data was collected during the spring and summer of 2020.