123. What’s Wrong With Coveting?
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From Freakonomics Radio, a series about the economics of higher education. The supply and the demand, the controversies and the hypocrisies, the answers and the questions. Why are more women going to college than men? What happens when Black and Hispanic students lose admissions advantages? How does the marketplace for higher education operate?

Hi, tell you something. It's a darn good question. Freakonomics Radio goes back to school. A series from the Freakonomics Radio podcast. You don't push it, you punch it. Come on. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, where is the line between a role model you admire and a competitor you envy? Good for them. I'm so glad that they're more successful than I am.

Angela, we recently received an interesting email from Tricia who says, why do humans seem to need to see, quote, someone like me in order to feel they can achieve something? There is no one, quote, like me except me. So if I truly want to do something, I will do what I can to do it.

it. Where does that like me come from? Let me just say to Tricia, when you say there is no one like me except me, I mean, no, there are a lot of people who are like you. Oh, really? I thought she was 100% right on that. Look, there is no other Tricia. And, you know, I'm not just giving Tricia a hard time, but there are people who have some resemblance to Tricia in their personality and character, in their personality

I think what you're saying is demonstrably true-ish, but I don't think it's true-ish.

But I also think that she's making a nuanced point, which is, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Individuals are individuals. And therefore, suggesting that I should emulate someone that is, quote, like me, just isn't really very satisfying because who cares if they're the same, you know, fill in the blank identifiers, racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and so on. I may have a lot more in common.

with someone that I don't look anything like. So I think your advice is true, but I think what she's rebelling against a little bit is getting advice like that and wanting to feel like it should fit her better. But I was actually thinking about this email recently when I was spending many, many, many, many hours in synagogue over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur because I

Among the many sins that we Jews are collectively told to atone for during this time is coveting. And believe me, if you want to read the list of all the sins that we atone for, it is like a catalog of the human condition. Lots of don'ts, not so many do's. But the reason we atone for coveting is that right there in the Ten Commandments, I believe it's number 10, are the instructions to not covet your neighbor's stuff or your neighbor's spouse. So coveting...

Cleanly, not a good thing. I've also heard a lot of people say that comparing yourself to others is also no good.

So Trisha's email got me spinning around because coveting, no good, I get. Comparing yourself to others, no good, I get. But what she's saying and what you are kind of reinforcing is that role modeling is a form of comparison that's actually really fruitful and a lot of people encourage it. So in my brain, I kind of mashed up her idea and the Ten Commandments and

And I came up with this question for you. Is it okay, even advisable, to compare myself to someone else as long as I don't covet? And assuming that your answer is yes, how do you suggest that Tricia or I or anyone can engage in, let's call it, non-covetous comparison?

I love this image of you spending hours and hours and hours in the synagogue. Hey, you're welcome anytime. Are you allowed to go if you're not Jewish? You're very much allowed to go. You're actually even encouraged to go. Is that right? I did not know that. Okay, my answer to this question, is it okay to compare myself to others as long as I don't covet?

Right.

We've talked about this kind of social comparison instinct that people have. I really do think it's like a reflex. It's like putting your hand on a stove. You just cannot not compare yourself. It's

It's spontaneous and I think it's useful. Like, how do I know whether my test score is good or bad if I don't know how other people did? But I think the emotional sequence that happens after you compare yourself to somebody is fascinating because it actually does seem to unfold in stages. So thinking about a recent article in JPSP, it's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

This article was published in 2018, and it's called The Painful Duality of Envy, Evidence for an Integrative Theory and a Meta-Analysis on the Relation of Envy and Schadenfreude.

Now, you probably know more about schadenfreude than I do. Oh, thanks a lot. That's very nice of you to say. No, because it's like the kind of thing you would not do, but certainly that you would know about. It's definitely in your brain, right? I mean, I am pretty interested in schadenfreude, but I think most people are.

I love schadenfreude stories so much that I actually recently bookmarked one because I wanted to not forget it. It's a very simple story. Can I share it with you, though? This is just on Reddit. I don't know if you ever read Reddit. Occasionally. I find it fun to dig in once in a while. So this is from somebody on Reddit. I'm sorry I don't have their handle handy, but it says...

My wife was sick one morning and I went out to get her medicine and return DVD to a Redbox machine. Wow, this is from like 1904. Yeah.

So for those who don't know, a Redbox machine was, I guess, pre-Netflix. For those who don't know, a DVD was how we used to watch things. Exactly. It was a computer disc that had a movie on it, and you would get it from a red vending machine, like in a supermarket, I guess. Yeah, they were usually outside the, like where the flower display was. So this guy is going to return a DVD to a Redbox machine while getting his wife medicine because she's sick.

He writes,

I then turned to the mother and show her that I was here to return Gnomeo and Juliet, but I can't wait any longer since my wife is sick. So I hopped in my car as the kid falls to the ground in a screaming, kicking temper tantrum. That's schadenfreude. It's also karma. It's so many things.

Interesting. OK, so it is taking some joy in the pain of another person, not like sadism, but more like the pain of another person who is a rival or a bad person in your life in some way. Or has given you reason perhaps to not root for their best interests, let's say.

So this article is less about schadenfreude and more about envy. And it's, you know, it was so interesting to me because what the data are saying is that when we make a comparison upward to somebody who is, I don't know, more beautiful, a better speaker, smarter, more popular, the first thing that happens is pain. So there's a kind of envy, which is this

flash of pain where we realize that we are inferior to that other person in some dimension. It's not like it's premeditated. It just happens.

I mean, I've confessed to you before my Adam Grant envy. Right. Adam Grant, of course, my colleague at Wharton and also a organizational psychologist. I remember that. I think Adam Grant also remembers that. And the fact that you can speak about it so candidly is really interesting and impressive to me. Yeah.

I feel like what happens next in this sequence is actually maybe revealing because that initial pain, like I wish I had whatever Adam has now, like three bestselling books. I wish I had a more impressive, you know, way of communicating with large audiences through Twitter. OK, so the next stage is one of two things.

I can either have this benign response, which is, how can I learn from what Adam does? Or like, wow, that's so impressive. Even your tone of voice indicated that your envy is not totally benign. Well, what's interesting is that benign envy isn't necessarily cheerful or positive. So the scientists in this investigation, who I should say who they are, Jens Lange, Aaron Weidman, and Jan Crucius,

They say that when you have benign envy following the first moment of painful envy, right, because that happens without much time passing at all, it's not necessarily like cheerful and rose-hued. Like, good for them. I'm so glad that they're more successful than I am. It's really just that there's some positive or neutral meaning that you're taking and also that you're motivated to do something like work on your own book.

So it doesn't have to feel good. And I don't think they think it does feel good. I think that benign envy, even though it sounds like it should feel great, is really mostly to be distinguished from malicious envy where you want that other person to suffer or you want them to do worse.

Okay. So as I'm envisioning it, there's a little bit of a choice tree here that you hear something or you learn something about someone else. You feel some pain and then you can go either the benign envy route or the malicious envy route. Is that the best you can hope for? Yeah, pretty much. Is that not good enough for you? I don't know.

I kind of feel like this benign thing is good. Like you have this like extra kick in your step. You're like, I'm going to do better. I see here it's called the pain driven dual envy theory. I guess I was hoping it might be called the pain driven tri envy theory or something like that in that there's like benign envy where you still feel envious.

There's malicious envy, as you put it, where you maybe actively feel bad or do something bad about it. But then I thought you were going to hit us with some like, oh, but there is the role model version of this where you look at this person and say, oh, I'm not in competition with this person. I'm just observing them as a practitioner of something that I practice. And therefore, they're a terrifically valuable resource to me. Does that not exist in the dual envy theory tree? I think these researchers are really

Depressed? Angry? Envious? I think they are nuanced, Stephen. And they say, hey, there are these other seemingly identical but distinct things that you could feel like you could just feel admiration for somebody, right? When you go to a Beyonce concert or like you listen to Taylor Swift, you know, do you feel the pain of envy? Yeah.

No, you just are like, wow, she's amazing. You know, Bob Cialdini talks about basking in reflected glory, the idea that, like, if you have somebody that you identify with, you can almost get their feeling of accomplishment just vicariously. Right. So all of these emotions are possible. What I really liked about this way of thinking about it is that if you do a kind of like time lapse thing,

slowing down of your emotions, you'll see that it's not just one thing, you know, depends on when you want to stop the footage. Fair enough. And I would imagine that the typical response would be to feel pain. I too am human and I totally, totally get that. But then when you're talking about benign and malicious, I kept wanting there to be, you know, another option or at least some mediating factor. But the minute you said about the time-lapse movie, it's,

it brought back some memories of speaking with my friend, Angela Duckworth, who said that sometimes the first and most important thing to do when you're trying to solve a problem, especially when you're right in the middle of something emotional is to notice it, right? Just to notice what you're doing, notice what you're feeling and acknowledge that feeling before you act on it.

You know, beyond noticing, there's having a language for what you're seeing or what you're feeling and saying to yourself like, oh, there's that first twinge of envy, which is painful, just like the JPSB article said. Yeah.

I think there's a lot of research from emotion regulation that suggests that you can direct this play a little bit. Like, okay, well, do you want it to shade into admiration and motivation? Or do you want it to shade into something greener and darker? So you can notice, you can name, and I do think you can direct.

at least to some extent. And for me, when I read this, I recognized what they meant when they said there's that like twinge of I'm inferior, ouch.

I have academic envy all the time. I read somebody's article and I think like, oh, my God, I send them to Katie Milkman all the time, like, oh, my God, I'm P. Green. I just wish I had published this such a creative idea. But with that energy and with time and then with me responding by doing more stuff or different stuff, emotions change yet again. And sometimes I have just plain old Taylor Swift admiration. Yeah.

Okay. So first of all, Taylor Swift is not in your cohort, so you don't have to be envious of her, right? I don't. Her new album apparently is amazing, by the way. But you're not envious. You can appreciate it. I am not. Because you're not in competition with her. You said that you'd say to Katie that you're pea green with envy. Let me commend you that you are pea green and not hunter or emerald green, which are deeper greens. So that connotes that you're not as envious as you could be. We need Pantone colors for envy. Yeah.

So Angie, I am really curious to hear from our listeners about, let's say it's an instance when you benefited from comparing yourself to someone or something. Make a voice memo with your phone. Just record it in a quiet place and send it to us, nsq at freakonomics.com. Maybe we can share it in a future episode.

Still to come on No Stupid Questions, how having a role model like you can affect your future success. I identify with people who grew up in southern New Jersey and went to a large suburban high school. You identify with them or you envy them? Just to clear that up. No Stupid Questions is sponsored by Rosetta Stone. Traveling to a place where people don't speak a lot of English? Then Rosetta Stone, one of the most trusted language learning programs, is for you.

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Now, back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about social comparison and role models.

I think there's a fundamental issue here, which is, you know, how do we deal with this social comparison reflex? And just getting back to the first thing Tricia asked, why do humans need to see someone like me? Yeah. I think it's important that when Tricia asked this question, she is asking about how is it that we need to see someone like me in order to feel like we can achieve something. That is foundational to a lot of old research, but there's really new research.

on modeling. Well, before you even do that, let me back up and unpack what you just said. You said this notion is foundational to old research. The foundation being what? That we do really strictly follow or adhere to role models who do, quote, look like us, gender, race, religion, etc.?

So the old research I'm referring to is Albandura, and now this goes back more than a half century. But the context is that at the time, Albandura is at Stanford University, and psychologists don't really believe that we learn by watching anything else happen. We don't learn vicariously. We only learn from our own experience.

punishment and reward. And this goes back to like behaviorism. You know, how do you get a rat to like learn a maze? Give him a sandwich. Give him a sandwich. Cheese sandwich, presumably. No, you don't let the rat watch another rat solve the maze. The rat's own experience is the only thing that matters. So Albandura comes along and thinks this is a bunch of hooey. He's like, no, so much, if not the preponderance perhaps of human learning is vicarious. I watch you like make a

batch of soup and I, you know, then make the soup myself. And of course, I can learn from another person. He did have these experiments where girls and boys were watching role models of either male or female gender. They were adults. But what he found in his data, first of all, affirmed his intuition that we can absolutely learn vicariously. He had these like stunning demonstrations where kids would watch an adult

do something with a toy. Oh, the Bobo clown or whatever that was, or they beat him up. The Bobo doll study is like this inflatable doll. Yeah, just explain that for people who haven't delighted in beating up the clown before. For those who have not yet heard of the Bobo doll study, it is like an essential element of psychological history. So what Albandura does is he has these clown dolls, the kind that you blow up and there's like a weight in the bottom and you can like push it and it comes back up. You don't push it, you punch it. Come on. Actually, that is what

Some of the role models did, and some of the experiments, they would, like, punch it and kick it, and other role models didn't do that. But what was really interesting is you would let kids watch these role models for something like 120 seconds, right? So just this, like, super brief thin slicing of watching an adult play with this doll, and then the kids were allowed to do whatever they wanted.

And they randomized the adults so that some were beating up the doll and some were not? Exactly. And I think apart from Al Bandura's intuition, and I'm not completely speculating because towards the end of his life, I used to call him a lot on weekends and listen to him tell stories about these things. And at the time, he was very concerned about the violence on television. That was a concern broadly, not just for professional psychologists like him. And people were wondering if kids watch a lot of violent television.

television, a lot of violent films, will they go out and commit violence? And so he had a second interest in this experiment because of that. So the primary finding is that, yeah, it doesn't take long at all. It takes minutes, if not seconds, for a young girl or boy to watch a grown-up do something and then mimic them almost to a T.

This is a tangent, but I am curious to know where he ultimately landed on violent TV and movies and actual crime. A lot of people have done research saying that, no, there doesn't seem to be a real effect of watching violence and real violence. But, you know, then there are those who argue the other way around. And I mean, if you think about how much violence there is in the TV and films that we watch,

I once heard someone make the argument pretty compellingly that if there was as much shooting in real life as there is in TV and films, that all the humans would have been gone a long time ago. Not to mention video games, which I think actually now have as many hours on task as

Films, certainly, and probably more than television. So what was his conclusion or finding? So Albandura was definitely, at least at the time, because you can see these little videos of Albandura, like talking about the research and also talking about what he thought. So I don't know whether that evolved as new data came in, but he was definitely of the view that when you have lots of violence online,

on the small screen that could carry over and influence the way kids were. I think it's important, though, to take everything in context. So, first of all, as you point out, lots of data now suggesting it's more complicated than that. But at the time, remember, the amount of media there was was just so much less. It's just different, I think, than it was. So are you saying that Al Bandura was the beginning of what we think of as the modern school of thought about role modeling?

I think Al Bandura's research was like the bedrock on which all of the modern research on role modeling was built. So can you just talk for a minute about the modern research on role modeling? Because I have seen papers like there's a paper called TAs Like Me, Racial Interactions Between

between graduate teaching assistants and undergraduates. This was published in the Journal of Public Economics. Yeah, Scott Carroll. Yeah. Okay. So if you know that paper, just give us a quick pricey of what that paper argues. So there are three authors, Lester Luscher, Doug Campbell, and Scott Carroll, all of them, I believe, economists. They did this very clever study at one of the UC colleges. I don't think it's named. I know Scott's at UC Davis, so let's pretend it's there.

That would make a lot of sense. So this is so clever because the question here is, was Al Bandura right? And does this actually happen in the real world? And I've read the original work that Al Bandura published, and he says in there that the similarity with your own gender actually matters. So if I watch a role model because I'm a girl and she's a woman, I'm going to follow that role model more than if I watch and it's a man.

So that's why this article called TAs Like Me, colon, Racial Interactions Between Graduate Teaching Assistants and Undergraduates is so related. And they, of course, cite Bandura because the question is not only –

Do we model people who look like us more? And this is so hard to study in the real world because you can't randomly assign presidents of the United States. You can't randomly assign many things. But what they were able to do is capitalize on this large economics course where you had undergraduates of—and this is important that it's in the UC school system. They're basically two races, Asian and white, I think, Asian, non-Asian races.

Of course, those aren't the only two ethnicities to be in the United States, but in the UC system, that is the majority of students. And they were able to say, look, who you get as your teaching assistant is effectively randomly assigned. You don't get to choose them and nobody's thinking about race when they're assigned. But we can capitalize on this random assignment of TAs and ask the question, do

undergraduates who were randomly assigned to get TAs of the same ethnicity perform better than those who were randomly assigned by luck to get a TA who was not of their ethnicity. And the stunning conclusion, and I will skip all the fancy math, there is a correlation between your match with your TA and your later performance objectively on exams.

in the econ course. And then we should just say, I've just given a quick scan of some related literature and there seems to be a really strong role model effect, let's call it. There's another paper written by an economist at West Point and an officer in the U.S. Army.

that finds that black cadets who are paired with black officers are 6.1 percentage points more likely, that's a lot, to pick their role model's branch than if the black cadet had worked with a white officer. I see there's

Some more work by the psychologist Sabrina Zirkle. She's now a college dean at Santa Clara University. And she found that compared to students who didn't have gender and race matched role models, those who did often earned better grades, thought more about their futures, et cetera, et cetera. So there seems to be a lot of research showing that

A, role modeling is important. And B, we role model on dimensions according to who we are to some large degree. And yeah, we go back to the original email from Tricia who says, I am me and I want to find a different, more individual route to the individual destination I want to get to. So what do you suggest to Tricia? Do you suggest you just

put her fingers in her ears and ignore all the role modeling research we've just discussed, for instance?

Well, look, Tricia could make Tricia's own decisions. And just the fact that it is easier for most people to identify with somebody who is of the same gender identity or race slash ethnicity doesn't mean that Tricia needs to primarily identify on that. I think the reason why gender and race and ethnicity are studied is that they are very salient categories for people.

But you could have a kind of, you know, I feel like I identify with people who grew up in,

Southern New Jersey and went to a large suburban high school. Wait, you identify with them or you envy them? Just to clear that up. I mostly identify with them. And I have to say there's not a lot to envy. Oh. I know. Some hatin' on South Jersey. Wow. Yeah, well, you know, I think it's not that Tricia needs to adhere to something that happens to be true for most people. But

But I think Tricia might notice that there could be, for her, people who on some dimension of similarity, like it's just more accessible. There's one more paper that just came out that I think is really relevant because I remember when I was reading this Al Bander work on similarity of the role model. And I asked a former postdoc of mine named Pete Mindle, and he's now at West Point, although he wasn't on the West Point paper that you were just mentioning.

And he has always been interested in moral exemplars. So Pete himself is quite moral. I don't know how else to describe it. He's just like somebody who thinks a lot about integrity and the right thing to do and then tries to live his life accordingly.

And he did this study that has a variety of different components. But one of the things that is really interesting is he was basically writing these little vignettes about people who had done altruistic things. And because they're stories, he can essentially, with a lot of control, not only randomly assign but very parametrically how much the role model in the story was like you. I see. Because.

Because, you know, it's a story. He can just write it however he wants. And when you look at that experimental research, what's interesting is that people are more likely to follow the moral exemplar if they are similar to them than if what was told in the actual plot seems like the most logical cost-benefit thing to do. That's really interesting. Yeah.

All this talk about role modeling does make me suspect that there's plainly a way to compare yourself without coveting, which is how we began this conversation. Now, I guess the key difference here is in the role modeling literature we've been talking about,

We are definitely assessing people of different status levels. Is that right? You can role model anyone. I mean, social norms are a kind of role modeling. Role modeling is like mimicry. Like, you know, you watch somebody do something and you do it. It is true that the more similar the role model is to you and also the higher status the role model is, the more the effect. But role modeling, strictly speaking, need not be somebody who is higher status than you. Yeah.

Let me bring this back to envy for a moment. Do you agree with the notion that envy destroys your ability to appreciate what you have? I mean, you could say like envy is the thief of joy. Comparison is the thief of joy, I think is the expression. There you go. I think that the idea that envy unfolds like so many other emotions in stages, like that JPSP article that I was emphatic

envying because it was so good. I think there is a stage of pain and there could be a stage where that becomes benign and you start to think, well, what can I do with that information? Like, what could I learn? And then there's maybe a stage of awe and admiration. I think that this full sequence of emotions probably happens in some version or another for all of us. Mm-hmm.

May I offer a cautionary tale about envy? Yes, please. I read this not long ago in a book by Joseph Tlishkin. It's a medieval folk tale that Tlishkin retells. It goes like this. A king promised a man anything he wanted on condition that the man's neighbor, whom he envied, would receive double.

Instead of being pleased by this extraordinary offer, again, it was anything he wanted. Instead of being pleased by this extraordinary offer, the man, obsessed and disheartened by his neighbor's even greater good fortune, asked the king to pluck out one of his eyes just so that his neighbor would lose both.

I had not heard that one. That's a little dark, Stephen, but it makes the point, doesn't it? You know who it reminded me of when I read it? No. It reminded me of Tanya Harding. Like, she was pretty good. Oh, right. But Nancy Kerrigan was better. Yeah. So, Angie, let me say this. If you and I were figure skaters, I would happily be a Tanya Harding to your Nancy Kerrigan. I'm okay with being...

Pretty good and happy. Also, I know people who have a crowbar. Yeah, I was going to say, are you happy to be Tanya Harding without knocking my knees out on the way from the locker room? Yeah, yeah. The non-felony, the non-felonious. The benign Tanya Harding. The benign as opposed to the malicious. Exactly.

No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now, here's a fact check of today's conversation. In the first half of the show, Stephen reads a story about schadenfreude from Reddit without crediting the author of the post.

The user in question goes by thesonofapreacherman, and the story was posted on Ask Reddit in 2011, the year that Cars 2 and Gnomeo and Juliet were released on DVD. Stephen and Angela made Redbox kiosks seem like a thing of the past, but there are reportedly about 36,000 rental stations that are still active in the United States. Also, Stephen says that Redbox was pre-Netflix, but

but Netflix was established in 1997 and Redbox was founded five years later, in 2002.

Later, Angela notes that one of the reasons she envies her colleague, organizational psychologist Adam Grant, is that Grant has three best-selling books. Grant has actually authored or co-authored four books that have made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Think Again, Originals, Give and Take, and Option B. Sorry, Angela.

Then, Angela says that the children in the Bobo doll studies learned violent behavior after watching adults for just 120 seconds. Kids actually observed adult participants beating up the toy for a total of 10 minutes before they were given the opportunity to interact with the dolls themselves.

Finally, Angela guesses that individuals today spend more time on average playing video games than watching television. According to data from the American Time Use Survey, young men, the biggest consumers of video games, play games for an average of about four hours a week and spend about 14 to 15 hours a week watching television. The demographic that watches the most television, men over 65,

Watch about 33 hours of television a week. That's it for the Fact Check. Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some of your thoughts on our recent episode about the importance of family. Here's what you said. Hi, I'm Clarissa from Manila. I think it isn't paradoxical that liberals would have the tendency to cut ties with family over politics. Because it's never just about politics. They affect lived experiences.

Your family's support of politicians who oppose liberties like same-sex marriage or abortion will affect you or at least some very important people in your life. You don't walk out in annoyance, you walk out deeply hurt and disappointed. Hi, I agree with Angela that everyone needs "don't worry, I got you no matter what" relationships. I think what matters is whether one comes from an honor culture or a dignity culture.

I found Ryan Brown's book Honor Bound really helpful to explain the difference between these cultures, but the super short version is that honor culture places more emphasis on the family unit, while dignity culture places more emphasis on the individual person.

So these cultures also appear to mirror our political leanings with the honor culture leaning conservative and the dignity culture leaning liberal. In an honor culture family, cutting ties might seem harmful to the family unit, while in a dignity culture, cutting ties might be considered helpful for an individual's mental and physical health. Hi, Stephen and Angela. This is Diego. I was born and raised in Colombia, and I first moved to the U.S. when I was 14 years old.

And to me, it was very fascinating the different nuances there are between both cultures. I was taught that my immediate family will always be my mother, siblings, cousins, aunts, even grandparents. So

So to me, that's very interesting and very particular because the American way of life is that my immediate family members are my wife in this case, and perhaps children have friends in Colombia who go through very hard times trying to separate themselves from family members. In the American way of life, perhaps it's a little bit easier to sort of say, you know what, I'm going to cut ties with my brother or my sister.

But in Colombian culture, it is very complicated for a lot of people to deal with those situations internally. Thank you for listening and hope you guys continue to kill it, having amazing conversations and thought starters for all of us.

That was, respectively, Clarissa, Meredith Halsey, and Diego Pinzon. Thanks to them and to everyone who sent us their thoughts. And remember, we'd still love to hear about a time when you benefited from comparing yourself to someone else.

Also, we're working on a special upcoming series on the seven deadly sins, and we're collecting listener thoughts and experiences for that as well. There's sloth, wrath, envy, pride, lust, gluttony, and greed. Are those behaviors really so bad? Which one do you struggle with the most? And if you could get a free pass on one of them, which would it be?

Send a voice memo or email to nsq at Freakonomics.com. Let us know your name and if you'd like to remain anonymous, you might end up on an upcoming show.

Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, why do people grind their teeth? Apparently George Clooney is a grinder. Really? Brooke Shields is a grinder. I want Barack Obama to be a teeth grinder. That would make me feel better. That's next week on No Stupid Questions. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and FreakonomicsMD.com.

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