#25. Politics, Rugby and Emotion Regulation: A snapshot of New Zealand (2023) - Prof. Marc Wilson and Terise Broodryk

It's election and rugby world cup time in Aotearoa New Zealand and Professor Marc Wilson and his team from Victoria University of Wellington are surveying the nation on aspects ranging from general well-being to politics in order to get a snapshot of the people of the country. Marc along with co-researcher Terise Broodryk join us to discuss the survey, some of the preliminary findings and how the nation has changed since Marc first started these surveys back in 2009.

The original article advertising the survey is linked here.

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Transcript

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Welcome everybody to the Smooth Brand Society. Our guests today are Mark Wilson and, Professor Mark Wilson and Terry's project. Mark was our very first guest on the actual show. Why is my screen not sharing? Oh, there we go. There it is. And the reason we asked him to come back on was because of this article. It's about a study which Mark and Teresa are conducting, well, Mark's lab is conducting with a few other members about they're trying to take us a survey, a snapshot of New Zealand. And this is not the first time Mark has done it. He spoke a little bit about this before on his first, what do you say, first time round on the podcast, but hopefully now we can get, we can focus purely on these types of large scale surveys and what they aim to do. And Therese can talk about her specific work within this and what they're trying to achieve. One thing I need to ask, you had mentioned that you've done four surveys of this sort. Did you look like this when you did your first survey? Yeah, back when I was 12, I did the first survey. Yeah, you did. They're not the only person to have asked this question. I think that the staff really need to update their stock photos. But yeah, welcome back, Mark. Welcome, Therese. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having us. Awesome. So can we start off with what this is all about? Moon landing maggots and mental health survey. Yeah, so you've already mentioned that I alluded to this the first time around. I feel like a veteran now. This is my second time on SmoothBrain podcast. So I've collaborated with the Star Times and other media a number of times in the past. And I can't remember exactly why I had the idea. So the first of these times was in 2008. And the Sunday Star Times National Newspaper had engaged in a number of surveys up until that point, but they'd been solely for the purpose of the newspaper. And I saw one of these, and this is back when actually, they had a physical survey in the newspaper. So you'd open up the survey, you'd tick the boxes, and then you would send it in. And I hate to think how expensive it must have been for them. but they've got a couple of thousand people. I thought, this is a fantastic way to try and get people involved and to take these kinds of snapshots of how we think. I sent the then editor an email which said, I appreciate you don't know who I am. I'm not a wing nut. I'm really interested in exploring whether or not you'd promote a survey for me. And that particular survey was based around what I call the spiritual lives of New Zealanders. So, to what extent and what's the nature of our belief in religious, paranormal, spiritual, conspiratorial, luck, superstition, you name it. If it falls under that sort of broad, we don't necessarily have evidence for it kind of heading, then it was in there. And they got back to me and said, how much is it going to cost us? And I said, nothing. I'll do all the work. And they replied almost immediately to say that was a great idea. And so the basic pitch is that they would promote the survey. I did this survey using SurveyMonkey. So it was an online survey, they promoted the link. And then as the data came in, I worked with their journalists to crunch the numbers and serialize the results back. And of course, we also used the data for publications in academic journals. I presented it at conferences as well. And that seemed to be a great kind of... way to go. I've got 6,000 people participated. I got a lot of email from people who were being very helpful with their suggestions. I also got quite a number of invitations to save my soul and to visit local churches, and a few accusations of either peddling conspiracy belief or trying to make conspiracy believers look weird. So it was a fantastic first outing. The second one happened in 2011 to coincide with the Rugby World Cup and the New Zealand election that year. In 2019, John Kerr, Samantha Stanley and I ran another survey on public understanding of science. We've got about 9,000 people participated. And this year I've got to do something I've always wanted to do, which is to try and take a snapshot of people's wellbeing. So what is the mental health state of the nation? which is the sort of broad heading of the survey. And so the article that you've just pointed us to is the sort of flagship piece that introduces it to people. It gives people a sense of some of the questions that are gonna be asked as well as some of the history to this. So that's it in a nutshell. Nice. So then what is different between this survey and your previous ones? You said something, you said like the previous ones looked at conspiracy belief and like all those things under that blanket, but this one's looking at mental health as well. The 2011 one spoke about the rugby world cup. There's a rugby world cup this year as well. Yeah. So this year is a confluence of things. So we've got, obviously I've got the mental health angle, but also we do ask questions people's political attitudes. We also ask people a reduced set of questions about rugby. And we've also got a significant chunk of material in there around people's emotional experience. And part of the reason for that is that I think there's good reason to think that emotions and the way that we experience and the way we think we should deal with them are actually important for mental health. They're potentially relevant in the context of politics. This is becoming a relatively... a new area, but growing area of research. And I think I don't have any specific expectations around the Rugby World Cup. But for example, we're hoping to do a sort of pre-post element to this to see whether or not people who said, yeah, I think the All Blacks are gonna win before the World Cup. How might you feel after the World Cup if we either do or do not win? So I think that that's in some ways the engine room of all of the things that are in the survey. So wait, does the survey then have questions which ask how you will feel if they don't win, or are you going to do another survey post? Well, that's the hope. I mean, we always end one of these surveys by asking people, are you willing to be contacted for a future survey, whilst pointing out that you don't have to do it, you're not obliged to. We're just asking for permission to invite you to do that. And so we can have a look and see what sort of things might change between now and then. And this is incredibly important. potentially powerful for people like me who do a lot of survey research, because it's very difficult for me to manipulate some of the things that I'm interested in, particularly say mental health. So if I think that how you feel emotionally is implicated in your mood, your well-being, I can't actually, it's hard for me to go out there and actually, while I can influence how people's emotions might be, I can show you cat videos and pictures of beer cubs playing, I can't test the reverse hypothesis, which is actually maybe it's your mental health that influences your emotions, because I can't go out there and manipulate, make people depressed, for example, make people anxious. So cross-lag panel models using longitudinal surveys are a statistical method to do this. I can have a look and see whether or not emotional experience at time one predicts future wellbeing and whether or not that relationship is stronger, weaker. different from the relationship between your wellbeing at time one and your emotional experience at time two. And in many cases, our research seems to show that many of the things we're interested in are kind of reciprocal. So if you're having trouble processing your emotions or you're dealing with a lot of negative emotions, that impacts on your wellbeing, which then can potentially impact on the way that you manage your emotional experience. Nice. In that regard, you have not looked at mental health in any of your previous surveys, have you, of this kind? I've touched on it. I've, on occasion, had some brief measures of just sort of mood in the moment, but those have been intended for other types of purposes, and I've tended not to do very much with them. but this survey has much more mental health-related content than I've ever had before. So it has a number of fairly standard measures of wellbeing, for example, the general health questionnaire, which has 12 items. That's a widely used survey around the world. It has some fairly well-established cutoffs that allow me to sort of draw, maybe not make diagnoses, but draw inferences about the extent to which people are experiencing clinically relevant distress. We also have questions that touch on other aspects of wellbeing that might include how you feel about eating, feel about your body. Do you procrastinate? How perfectionistic are you? Do you feel imposter syndrome? Have you have you either been a victim or a perpetrator of bullying? And I'm very intrigued to see what comes out of this set of questions, because I've asked people about their experience of being ghosted and whether they've ghosted other people. which is not something I think that was part of our general parlance, maybe 10 years ago. And again, I've got other things in the survey that I think might be helpful in predicting those sorts of things. Um, any, anything interesting so far or, um, in that regard? Oh, it's all interesting. So, I mean, uh, I'll give you a quick sense of some of the things that, that I've been trying to do. Um, so for example, I mentioned that we have this set of standardized questions that ask about how you've been feeling over the last couple of weeks. And generally speaking, um, and this is both reassuring, but also not reassuring. Um, because about about a quarter of the people who've responded so far have met that sort of general expectation for actually, maybe you are experiencing some serious distress. That sounds like a lot, but actually it's fairly consistent with the use of this measure in other large popular community studies in places like the United Kingdom, for example, which shows similar types of levels. Interestingly enough, politicians tend to experience about twice as much, about twice as, twice at risk of clinical mental distress. One of the other things in the survey, which I was a little bit reticent about including, because it can sometimes raise conversations about sensitive issues, but nobody has ever looked at previously, is something we've talked about previously, non-suicidal self-injury. So where people hurt themselves deliberately, but without any intent to die. We have no good data on this in New Zealand. The best, the closest that we have is survey-based data with... university students who in many ways are a great sample when we think about people who are going through life transitions because most university students have recently transitioned from secondary school into the life that follows. But we don't know much about what happens to middle-aged people, about older adults. And again, this survey at the moment seems to be suggesting something like 25 to 30% of the people who participated say, yeah, actually, I've done this at least once. and of those people, something like half say that they have done so in the last year, which is, unfortunately, reinforces my perception of New Zealand in self-injury research as being, as having some of the higher levels in the world. And this potentially reflects the kinds of stresses that people are feeling. I mean, if you just look at the news at the moment, there's a lot of talk about inflation, there's a lot of talk about the cost of housing, there's a lot of concern around the cost of living. And if we look at the survey, then people who report the higher levels of mental distress are also more likely to say things like, actually, my life doesn't feel like it's going in the right direction. I worry reasonably frequently about being able to pay for things like rent, mortgage, food, electricity. So again, I think this is an incredibly useful snapshot of what it's like for us in terms of our wellbeing right now in this moment. I guess the other thing it has is you're taking a snapshot just post a pandemic, which is completely different from, um, your previous surveys. Yeah. So, well, I mean, firstly, are we post pandemic? In theory. That's yeah. In theory. That's right. Um, and in fact, I haven't had to look at that, what this might predict, but, um, I have asked people in the survey, whether or not. they have had COVID and the vast, vast majority of participants say that yes, they have well over 60, 70%. I also have about 10% of the sample who say that they have had it more than once. And there's a relatively small group in terms of absolute number, something like one to 3% who say that they have been diagnosed with long COVID. Long COVID I think is going to be, I think it's going to be one of the mental health and physical health well-being challenges for us over the next five, 10 years. We don't necessarily have the best sense of what this thing that I'm calling Long COVID is. Some international prevalence studies suggest that as much as 10% of those people who've had COVID will experience it. But if you look at the kinds of resources that we have available to help with it, they're primarily medical. We don't have a good sense about exactly how to medically treat it. But we also have, we know even less about how to help people psychologically who are experiencing the symptoms that go along with long COVID. In the United States last year, there were a small number of mental health clinics, specialist mental health clinics established specifically to look, to deal with people, to help and support people who have been diagnosed with long COVID, but that's five across the whole country. We don't even have one. Yeah, do you know, is there a particular reason why we just have, while we don't even have one, is it a very, is it just a political thing or? I suspect that the reason why we don't have dedicated support services around long COVID is in part, I don't think we've appreciated the scale of the potential problem yet. Um, I think, um, it's going to take a little while before the consequences trickle through. Um, even now we're seeing. a higher level of absenteeism from work in association with COVID, in part because people are doing exactly what we have asked of them. They are staying home if they are unwell. People with long COVID, however, may not just be staying home to help other people stay well, but actually because they can't do it. So I think there's the risk that it's going to impact on our productivity. I think it also reflects exactly what you said, which is that we tend to... in our discussions about well-being, find it easier to talk about physical health, in part because a lot of markers of physical ill health are obvious. So if I turn up to work with two arms in a cast, my boss is gonna know that I'm unwell and he's going to send me home. But if I look otherwise okay, I think it's less obvious that people are suffering. I'll give you an example. At the moment in the lead up to the current general election, there is a bit of... political one-upmanship going on between National and Labour. National has indicated it's going to support the development of a new medical school in the Waikato and that will allow us to start training 300 something more students, more med students each year. Labour has matched that by saying that they'll increase the number of places at our existing medical schools. At a recent debate held by the New Zealand Psychological Society with mental health spokespeople of four of the major parties, it was generally recognized that we have a problem in terms of our psychologist workforce. So at the moment, the estimate suggests that we're something like a thousand clinical psychologists short of what we need to handle and to support our current mental health need. At the same time, we produce something like 60 to 70 clinical psychologists a year. National Labour are talking about increasing the number of people who start training as doctors by 300. Every year we graduate something like five, six, seven times more doctors than we do clinical psychologists. And the challenge of meeting our need for doctors, we need 1500 more doctors in the country right now, a thousand more clinical psychologists. I think that, I put my head in my hand sometimes because actually I think that psychology and mental health. while everybody recognizes the importance of it is the poor cousin to the things that are traditionally considered to be well-being related. And oftentimes these things are more visually more obvious to us, to the people that we live with and to the people who employ us. That was really long-winded. That sounded like a polemic. I apologize. That's all good. Because you mentioned politics. And I know Therese is doing her entire PhD on emotion regulation and politics. Can we, we can move on to the politics side of your survey. Um, and can I ask what you're trying to achieve with it? What questions are in it? Um, what's the kind of, yeah, what are the kind of goals, especially because it is an election year. Sure. So again, I mean, one of the reasons why I like doing these things in election years is because it gives us a snapshot of what's going on in the moment. So the survey itself has a bunch of things that wouldn't be able to place in any political psychology or political science survey. So we have standard questions about who would you vote for with your party vote, your electorate vote, who's your preferred prime minister. I've also asked questions like would you vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden if you had to, which suggests that actually generally speaking Joe Biden would be a walk-in if we were only allowed to vote for him. We also have a lot of standard attitude style questions. And amongst those, I have some standard toys that I've historically always used in my surveys. So measures of, for example, social dominance orientation, which is a measure of the relative extent to which people think that the world should be organized hierarchically, so with different classes, for example. I also ask questions about authoritarianism. So this year, I've got two different flavors of that, right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing authoritarianism, to try and get a more holistic sense how authoritarianism fits into our broad political spectrum. And what we're finding from that is pretty much what we would expect. People are more likely to display right-wing flavors of authoritarianism if they vote national or act. People are more likely to display left-wing authoritarianism flavors if they support Te Pati Māori, the Greens or Labour. But this is where I think we diverge from my historical things is in trying to support and look at Theresa's PhD topic. which is at that intersection of politics, conspiracy and emotional experience. So I'll hand over to Therese to tell us what do we mean when we talk about emotion regulation? Yeah, so, um, you've had Paul Joyce on the podcast before, I believe, there's Paul Joyce and his, um, a lot of his research is on emotion and he's one of my supervisors as well. Um, and so what we talk about, I mean, talking about emotion regulation is, um, kind of how when we go about the world and we experience emotions, we aren't just subject to that emotion and that we just like feel it and are forced to feel it, um, but we have our own ability to shape. how we experience that emotion and how we express that emotion. And so when we talk about emotion regulation, we're talking about people's goals in terms of what emotions they want to feel in the moment and what emotions they don't want to feel in the moment. So an example of that might be you find out that you've got a you've got a test grade back that you're really not happy with and you're feeling quite sad about that. But you might be in a social situation where you don't want to express that sadness in the moment. your goal in that situation is to decrease the sadness you're feeling and maybe increase some positive emotions that help with the social situation. So in that case, you'll want to do something called upregulate your positive emotions and downregulate your negative emotions. You could also want to do the opposite. So if you're gearing up for a fight, for example, you might want to up-regulate emotions like anger, which we might typically describe as negative, but it's advantageous in the moment, that kind of emotion. And you might want to decrease feelings of or down-regulate more positive feelings like calmness and relaxation. So in that sense, we're interested in what people's goals are in terms of what they want to do and then how they go about doing that. There's a whole bunch of strategies that we all use every day to go about those kinds of goals that we have. throughout our daily lives. Some examples being like distracting ourselves from the situation or we might want to try and think about the bright side of things, try and reappraise the situation that we're in or that we're thinking about. And so when we're talking about emotion regulation, we're talking about what kind of goals people have for their emotions and then how they go about doing that and achieving that. So for my PhD, I'm wanting to look at that, but in the context of political emotions, the emotions that people have about politics, and more specifically the emotions people have about politics if they tend to believe in conspiracy theories. So then, what do you mean by emotion regulation in terms of conspiracy theories? Could you elaborate on that? Yeah. It's quite interesting because a lot of the research that goes into conspiracy theory belief, while they talk about that belief being emotional, there's not actually a lot of research into the way that emotions play into that belief, which is quite interesting because when you look at situations where you might run into conspiracy theory belief, The Wellington protests, for example, last year when a bunch of people camped out in parliament lawn for three weeks because they were upset with the vaccine mandates and there was a lot of conspiracy theory talk about vaccine mandates there. When people were talking about it, they were really emotional about it. You couldn't sense that they really care and they have really strong feelings about the situation that they're in. But so it's quite interesting that the research doesn't reflect that. And so what I'm interested in is... the kind of the role that emotions play in the conspiracy theory belief. And when I talk about emotion regulation and emotion regulation research, that kind of research and those people who do that research don't really talk to the people who do political research or conspiracy theory research. So there's not a lot of intersect in that. And a lot of the conspiracy theory and political research, the way that they treat emotion, it's not quite up to scratch in terms of how we understand emotion as a complex. mechanistic process in the way that the emotion people think about emotion. And so I'm interested in looking at how that emotional process happens for people who are experienced, who believe in conspiracy theories and how that might happen for them when they're feeling emotions about politics more specifically. So then what emotions do you associate with conspiracy belief? Like why would someone even fall, well, why would someone fall into the conspiracy belief, like rabbit hole per se? So people would fall into the rabbit hole as you described for a lot of reasons. But when we're talking about emotion, the little research that does exist out there kind of talks about the role of existential threat and anxiety. So people are feeling... not great about the state of the world, and that those emotions are then what go and elicit the looking for conspiracy theory belief or belief in those kinds of ideas. And a lot of the theory suggests that, but in the way in which that actually works and actually works in a process, and whether that happens before the belief or that's only happening during the belief or as a result of the belief is not quite clear, which is also part of what I'm wanting to do here with the survey, is having a look at that process. So in that regard, what kind of questions have you asked in the survey? Yeah, so what we've looked at, well, we've put in two different measures of conspiracy belief because there's a bit of debate about which is the best way to measure conspiracy theory belief. But in terms of the emotion questions, we've asked people whether they've thought about politics at all in the past wee while. And the people who have tell us what they've been thinking about. And then we ask them, has this made you feel a certain way? Has this elicited your emotions? And if they say yes, then we ask them what emotions they're feeling. And then how they've gone about to, gone about managing those emotions, what their goals are for those emotions and how they manage them. And then whether they felt that they were successful in being able to manage them. Have you had a look? Have you had a look at what the data is showing? I haven't had, I haven't been able to get to my work actually this afternoon. I've only just got to work as we were starting to record. So I haven't been able to fully have a look exactly what's going on. Um, but I have, I've been able to look at the list of things that people have said that they're thinking about, um, which is a real range of things. It's quite interesting. A lot of it's election focused as we are in the ramp to an election right now. But some of it's like American based as well. Um, which is also interesting just thinking about the importance of. American politics on New Zealand. Well, I mean, you made an active decision not just to ask about New Zealand politics, right? Because the very small body of research that does exist that's looked at emotion, emotion regulation in the context of politics, has actually, most of it's been done in America, and it tends to be quite parochial. And I think that there are problems with that in part. I'm sure if I suspect local politics is really important for anybody, but there are things, particularly potentially as New Zealanders, that have huge potential impacts on our lives that actually occur a long, long way away. I mean, at the moment, Zelensky and Biden have been talking at the UN, for example. That has huge implications for us for the other side of the world. Mark, you had mentioned in our last recording a little bit about why people believe conspiracy theories. Could you give us a quick recap of that? What are conspiracy theories in general? What if it's not really conspiracy? What if the rest of us are in denial? Well, I'm going to be really mean. I'm going to throw that over to Therese. Because actually, we've been thinking about exactly this question. So there's a lot of different reasons that the research credits for why people believe in conspiracy theories. And it's interesting looking at the literature and trying to see the theory trying to make sense of all of these different working parts that might occur for a person. A lot of the time the research credits the sense of... powerlessness and enemy and things that are about kind of a social isolation that might lead people to believe in conspiracy theories. There's also a mental health aspect which is contentious within the literature but looking at things like paranoia or schizotypy or so things of that nature and how they relate to conspiracy theory belief that might prime someone to paranoid beliefs and paranoia in a sense. There's also a bunch of social elements as well to do with intergroup relations and wanting to protect your group and make sure that your group is seen as positively by you and by other people. And so a conspiracy theory might play into helping retain that positive self-image. And a bunch of cognitive elements as well. So things like heightened agency detection and threat perception and those kinds of cognitive elements, which might be part of the wider picture of looking for patterns and things within politics and within full conspiracy beliefs to try and pick out patterns and come to this conclusion of this conspiracy theory. I'm sure Mark can add quite a few other things to that. I think that's a good summary. I think one of the things that intrigues me about this area of research now, so research on conspiracy theories is relatively recent. I think most people would sort of date the first psychological study on conspiracy probably to the mid-90s, a publication by Ted Gertzell in Political Psychology, which laid some of the foundation for what we're talking about today. And part of the reason why it's a relatively new area of interest is because of the events post 9-11. That not only made, invited people to think a little bit more about large-scale conspiracy but it also coincided with the rise in popularity of the internet, which meant that the conspiracy theory could spread, it added a new disease vector for conspiracy theory, and it also importantly allowed a space for people who might have skepticism, who might be skeptical and think about whether or not the official stories are true, a place to actually virtually meet. And I think one of the important things that I'd usually make a distinction about at this point is, between conspiracy belief and conspiracy theorists. Our research, including in this survey, suggests that actually many of us endorse at least one thing that could be, could meet a kind of academic definition of conspiracy theory. But only something like 10% of us, I would usually say 5% of us would actually endorse all of those. But the latest version of the data that I've looked at from the survey says that that's somewhere about 10% of us endorse pretty much all of them. So is that like an increase from like your previous? Yeah, it's a close to a doubling from the previous time that we did an in-depth look at people's endorsement of specific conspiracy theories. And by that, I mean the extent to which people do think that the American government was involved in some way in 9-11, the extent to which people think that the Rugby World Cup in 1995, the final... was preceded by the All Blacks being deliberately poisoned, which is a particularly parochial example, which I love to throw in, but also things like whether or not NASA faked the moon landings, whether or not QAnon has a basis in reality, and the answer to that one is not really according to our participants. Something like 1% of people in this survey said that QAnon has something going for it, but actually... that distorts things a little bit, because actually the vast majority of people who participate in the survey have no idea what QAnon is, which I kind of take as a fairly healthy indication for our democracy, right? I mean, given that so few people know what it is, it's probably pertinent for me to sort of quickly outline what that is. And it's this general idea that in America in particular, there's a group of elites who tend to be democratic, they tend to be from Hollywood, They tend to be bankers who are engaging in trafficking children so that they can kill them and then suck a thing called adrenochrome out of their brains, which is a substance they then apparently use to make themselves live longer. And the American military, sick and tired of this being allowed to happen for a long time, deliberately recruited Donald Trump to run the country and to bring the storm, which would be the revolution in which all of these people would be rounded up by the military and put into Guantanamo Bay. tried and then executed, which obviously didn't happen after Donald Trump's failure to win his second term. To my ears, that sounds like a fairly unlikely set of fears, but in the US, surveys would indicate that something like 15% of the population would actually endorse some version of that. So again, I like to think that this is a sign that we have a relatively healthy democracy. Speaking of democracy, we saw for the last couple of years, there's been a lot of things about the elections being rigged in the States. Do you think there's any fears over here of that? I'm sure that there are, but I think that again, it's certainly, it's not a dominant discourse. I mean, I'll be very interested to see what our turnout is this year, because compared to many nations, we have excellent turnout, particularly when we compare ourselves to countries where... voting is not mandatory. So in Australia, for example, it actually is technically illegal for people not to vote. So they routinely get into the sort of 90% kind of region. Can you remember what the turnout was in the last election, Therese? I think the election turnout, no, I can't recall off the top of my head. I think it's been floating around in the sort of mid to high 70s. I was gonna say high 70s, I think is where it was. Which was a slight uptake from where it had been three or four elections ago. But of course, why would you vote if you don't trust the system? So I would be hopeful that this time around we're going to see at least the kind of historically similar levels. At the same time, political science research says that turnout tends to be higher when the outcome is likely to be close. And at the moment, so for example, if people read the newspapers today and go, ah, well, I'm pretty sure that National Enact are going to get a... get to govern regardless of what I do, why would I bother voting? And that could happen for both national act voters and also for people who would actually prefer Labour Greens to Patimati government. I think what's quite interesting about this election as well from the conspiracy angle is that while I would say that kind of rhetoric about elections being rigged has kind of increased a lot with Trump actively pushing those ideas and inviting the idea of alternative facts and an alternative version of events. And this election cycle in New Zealand, we've got some active representation that's quite a bit louder than normally that we've had in the past that represents these kinds of ideas for people as well. We've got specific parties that are running like NZ loyal, which really within their policies have a lot of these beliefs sitting there. And so I'm interested in if, you know, these, the, on the one hand, if people believe that things are rigged around this idea that politics and conspiracies within politics, then it's not worth voting versus there is this party that is championing these ideas and it's going to fix the problem. It's quite interesting contention and whether people will. turn out to vote for that? I mean, the survey sample is not unbiased. It's being filled in by people who are familiar with, who use stuff for their news, for example. So it's likely to under count people who are skeptical about both elections, but also about mainstream media. So I wouldn't actually use it as an indication of what the vote is gonna be like in the election. But what it does allow us to do is have a look at psychological differences between people who might say that they're gonna vote for, say, the Greens, National, Labour, New Zealand first. New Zealand First in these surveys has historically tended to score higher on things that include a scepticism for the official version. And that makes perfect sense in relation to some of the theories about conspiracy, which might say, for example, that people who are on the political fringe are more likely to endorse conspiracies because we tend to vote the way we do because we think that that's the right thing to do. But how do we then reconcile that psychological tension with the knowledge that We voted for Winston Peters, but only 5% of the population also did. Well, maybe it's because there's been a conspiracy. And what I can say from the survey already is that New Zealand First supporters considerably more disaffected and unhappy compared to voters for pretty much all of the other parties. They're more likely to say that their personal life is going in the wrong direction. They're more likely to say that the country is going in the wrong direction. And... I think if you have a look, as I did today, at New Zealand First 2020 manifesto compared to their current manifesto, there has been a marked shift in the people that New Zealand First is targeting. I think that they're quite deliberately targeting the kinds of people who were very upset with vaccine mandates. I think they're targeting people who were in support of things like the parliamentary protest. And probably... many of these people are less happy because they actually came out of it worse. I don't think that's an unreasonable conclusion to draw. And I think it's really important, while it's easy to characterise people who believe in conspiracies as some kind of tinfoil hat wearing paranoid, actually, this isn't a spectator sport. And clearly, many people are very, very unhappy. Do you think from a political standpoint then that, like NZ First Manifesto, are they targeting such people because they think it's the best way to get into government or is the manifesto like that because the party itself believes these things or the members of the party believe these things? So it's usually at this point, if this was a class, I would throw it back to you and say, it's an interesting question, Sahir. You must have an intuition about this. So What do you think? But I'm going to do something even worse. I'm going to say, what do you reckon, Therese? Yes. I've come on this podcast just to be... The support act. It's really a chicken and egg situation. I do think that during the Wellington protest, protest at least here, the fact that Woodson Fielder is one of the only politicians to go out and speak to the people. on the living on parliament and all of the time. Um, it's quite interesting. I do think there is an, might be an element there of, of finding the nation, fitting yourself into it. Um, especially if you see a group of people who are quite vocal about what they want and that none of the other parties are providing that kind of service to them or any kind of, um, I like, yeah, providing any kind of service to them or talking to them or representing them that might be a good idea to jump in there. Um, I also think that it's an interesting situation for New Zealand first in that they were out of parliament in this past, uh, electoral cycle, and so they've had to kind of rebuild from the ground up. And so the new people that have brought on board might genuinely also have, have had these beliefs in the first place and then be an influence on their manifesto. Um, I don't think I can give a. proper answer to that, I'm sorry. Well, I mean, I think it's an important question to ask. And actually, I think I actually agree with you. I think that this is a deliberate rebrand. And as I say, if you go and have a look at the 2020 and the 2023 manifestos, they are markedly different. Firstly, in terms of the level of detail, there's much less detail this time. The policy platform for New Zealand First is very, very specific this time around. And I think that it is intended to directly market to... probably two or three primary groups. Firstly, older New Zealanders, particularly disaffected older New Zealanders who feel they've been left behind. That's a traditional New Zealand First constituency. A second constituency is people living in the regions. There are a lot of policies that are very, very specifically intended to benefit the far north. And I think that there's also this, I think that the group that Therese and I have already talked about, as people who have concerns about freedoms based on their experience during COVID. And I think it's entirely deliberate. And I also don't blame New Zealand First for doing it. They fell out of power in 2020. They didn't make it back into parliament. So it kind of makes sense for them to go back and have a look at how they marketed themselves. That's fair. Well, it is playing politics. Well, I think all, I mean, but that's what it is. I mean, there's that famous phrase, you know, the saying, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. But what people don't know is that what comes after it is, and once the practice is perfected, that's the time to get elected. Oh dear. So, I mean, coming back to the subject of conspiracy. I think I'm very interested in this question about the extent and the nature of the relationship with emotional experience. And coming back to the discussion that we've had about Paul Joseph's research, so Paul has a slightly different take about emotional experience to many emotion regulation specialists who focus on these kinds of stage theories of emotion regulation that say that from the moment that something happens in the environment, there are a variety of different points that we as emotional experiences can intervene to change or to manage the way that we respond. Paul has, Paul's particularly interested in what the emotional goals are. So when we, are we trying to actually seek out positive emotions? Are we trying to avoid negative ones? And that is probably... how most people think about emotions. I mean, it's manifestly makes sense that we want good things to happen and we wanna avoid negative ones. But Paul has a measure that also asks about the extent to which people try to seek out negative emotions or to avoid positive ones. And what he finds is that fairly consistently, there's a relatively small group of people who don't try to maximize their positive emotions. Instead, they'd seem to be to some extent, seeking out the negative rather than focusing and accentuating the positive. And the data in this survey is hinting that if we compare people who endorse most of these conspiracy theories with people who don't, then actually there's some support for Paul's idea that actually people who endorse more conspiracy theories are more likely to say, actually I do seek out negative emotions, perhaps more than the average person. And they're also more likely to say that they seek to avoid positive emotions. This is a really interesting finding and one that I think we need to dig into to try and conceptualize. What does this mean for our theories about conspiracy theory and the way the world works? And one possibility is we know about state dependent learning and state dependent cognition that says that when we're feeling bad, we tend to find it easier to bring to mind negative experiences, negative memories. So maybe. It's something about the position from which people who tend to believe conspiracies come from in the first place that makes them more sensitive to negative emotions and less likely to seek out the positive. Does this link into how we generally conceptualize or talk about pessimism colloquially? Or is this a bit different to that? Because we know how we make fun of some people being like, oh, you look at the glass as half empty even when it's full. Does this come under the same thing or is it slightly different? I have an angle on that. Therese, have you looked at it? Does pessimism come up in the context of your research? No, not often. Yeah, no, I'd say no. But I'd love to hear your thoughts. Well, what I would say is that, I'm going to come at this from a slightly weird angle. So in these surveys, I routinely ask people about happiness. And the research that's developed around the subjective experience of happiness over the last 15, 20 years says that if we think of the variation in how much happiness we have as a kind of lemon meringue pie, then about 10 percent of that lemon meringue pie or how happy we are is explained by what's happening to us here in the moment. So if I win lotto, I'm going to be briefly really happy. But research also shows that about a year afterwards, I'm going to return to whatever my baseline level of happiness was. Another 40 odd percent of it appears to be genetic. So if your parents were miserable buggers, then, sorry, there's a statistically higher chance that your baseline setting of happiness is gonna be lower than other people's. What's the other 50%? Well, it's to do with exactly what Therese is talking about. It's how we see the world, how we actively engage with it and choose to see it. So do we actually try to accentuate the positive? I think the same thing applies to pessimism, which is to say there is a trait and a state level component. So all of us will have, I mean, we know they are miserable, pessimists, for example, who probably talk about themselves as realists, not pessimists, have a lower, higher pessimism setting than most of us. But then on any particular day, there's a bit of variance that's associated with what's going on around you. And because of this, what we know about state-dependent mood and its effects, I think it makes perfect sense that I bet you pessimistic people are more likely to attend to things. Firstly, people tend to attend to the things selectively that bear out their view of the world anyway. So if you're pessimistic, you're probably going to pay more attention to the signs that say actually the world is going in the wrong direction, rather than focus on the more positive types of things. pulling up my data to see what we can say about happiness based on politics. Yeah. I was going to ask any other, well, we linked New Zealand first a lot. What about the other party voters? What kind of trends have you found? And what kind of trends have you seen previously as well, while you look up your current data? Well, one of the things that I'm kind of interested in, in the context of this survey, is, so we haven't talked about the rugby stuff for example. So going into the last, so the 2011 survey and the 2011 election and rugby world cup, most New Zealanders were really optimistic about the outcome of the rugby world cup. So 70 odd, the average estimate of what the chances of the All Blacks of winning was about 70 percent. This time around not so much, sort of 44 At the same time, much to my, I would love it if the survey had opened a week earlier. We happened to open it immediately on the same day as the first All Black game. And of course they lost to France. What we found in 2011 though, was that national party supporters tended to be more enthusiastic about rugby. They tended to say that it was more a part of their identity. And I wonder whether that's an indicator. Well, part of the reason for it was in fact, if you were a national party supporter back in 2011, the world was actually going probably in your direction. We had a National Party-led government, and we were coming out of the global financial crisis, which New Zealand was relatively well positioned for. This time around, I don't think it's National Party supporters who are going to be the most optimistic, and the ones who feel rugby is more at their core. Why am I even interested in rugby? Some people might say. I'm interested in rugby for several reasons. One of them is both theoretically, and I'll come to that in a second. The other part of it though, is that rugby is a really important part of New Zealanders' lives. Anyone who has walked through a city as an all-black game is about to start, will watch it come to a standstill. It is in many ways our state religion. Why might that be? Well, things like social identity theory say that we, a part of our self-esteem comes from attaching ourselves to things that we know are positively evaluated by other people. So supporting a sports team that we know other people value think is really good, and which wins most of the time, allows us to bask in the reflected glory of those outcomes, even though we did not directly influence them. And that's great when your rugby team's winning, but of course sometimes that doesn't happen. And social identity theory would predict that in the event that we don't win this Rugby World Cup. there are three different things that we're gonna see a lot of. We're gonna see a lot of people saying, now, I never really liked the rugby, I always preferred soccer, which is so disidentifying, changing your affiliation. We're gonna see a lot of people who are gonna change the domain of comparison. So sure, the All Blacks may not have scored the most points, but they played the most exciting rugby. So we can still feel positive about it, even though we've lost. Which is objectively not true at the moment. Yeah, well, let's not let reality get in the way. And the third part, the third strategy that people engage in is they will support the ABs even harder. They will buy twice as much merch, they will shout twice as hard at the television, and they will be doing it because they're trying to make the outcome they want happen. So that's one of the reasons why I'm interested. And hardly anyone's ever looked at this, which is a bit of a surprise given that rugby is so important to us. Have people looked at it in other countries? I know, I guess America does not compete in other sports against the world, really. But, you know, like football in Latin America or cricket in India or anything like that. So there has been some research that came out of the United Kingdom about rugby. I can't remember if it was Wales or Ireland. There was a big realignment of domestic rugby in whichever country I'm thinking of, such that there was some... amalgamations of rugby teams, which was an interesting sort of pseudo experiment to have a look at how people's identity changed. In the context of America, one of the very famous social psychologists and attitude researchers, Robert Cialdini, has published on this. And partly it came out of his experience of walking across the campus the day after the university American football team had won a game and notice how so many people seem to be wearing... the t-shirts, they were wearing the uniforms. And so he had a look at this and coined a term basking in reflected glory, which is when the team wins, we want to show that we helped them do it by wearing the merch and then there's coughing at the other end, which is cutting off reflected failure, which is not only do we not wear the merch, but we say we didn't watch the game and we didn't really care about it in the first place. A quick anecdote because if people who don't know about New Zealand and New Zealand's love with rugby. I remember, I think this was, I want to say this was about 2017, my last year of undergrad, and I had this Italian friend who also loves rugby, and he came over for exchange. And around the same time, the Oblux lost to South Africa, I'm pretty sure, and this was the first time they had lost in God knows how long. And... His immediate question to me was, oh, so is the prime minister going to resign now? Because, and I was like, probably, I don't know. I'm not used to this. Well, you're a long time, you're a big cricket fan, right? Yeah, I am. I spent years and years of my life supporting the English cricket team. It was quite depressing. Don't worry. Supporting the New Zealand cricket team is very depressing as well. I spend a lot of my life losing. Therefore, I don't understand why I don't really get the affinity of national pride with it because you lose so often that associating it to politics and things doesn't really make up. Well, I think the other reason why it's potentially interesting to be looking at things like the confluence of rugby and politics is because we hear anecdotally every election that... and every World Cup, and in fact, even outside of World Cup seasons, that there are increases in things like aggressive crime and domestic abuse that result if the All Blacks lose. It's actually very difficult to find objective data to support this, certainly here in New Zealand, but I think it means that it's important for us to be thinking about how this affects the national mood. And I think one of the things that's happening at the moment is part of this the samples general pessimism about the all blacks chances, maybe a reflection of the fact that they haven't had a great couple of years by all black standards, but also because it's part of that general feeling that our lives are not going quite right. We've had this pandemic, it's had wide, far reaching consequences for our wellbeing. It appears to have impacted our economy. The concern over things like freedoms and mandates, the high inflation level, the ridiculous cost of rent and mortgage payments, high inflation. I think it all comes together with this general feeling that things aren't right and we want things to change. That's an incredibly awkward position for an incumbent government to be in because it's incredibly difficult for them to push back at the kind of momentum that idea has and say, not unreasonably, actually, you know what? The pandemic was tough. The... floods in Napier Hawke's Bay, we're devastating and we're going to be paying for the consequences of both of these things for a very long time indeed. So I'm glad I'm not a politician right now. Yeah. What was I going to say? I blanked. I was going to ask then, is there any difference in hope or optimism between party voters from what you've seen right now? Is there a general sense of despair? Oh, I think that parties are the right. So people who might traditionally vote for ACT and national are probably feeling reasonably good at the moment. because the polls will be indicating that they're going to get something closer to what they want than perhaps they've had for the last few years. I think that there is an ideological... historically in New Zealand, there's an ideological kind of pessimism gap. I think that traditionally the parties of the left may have been more worried about the future than parties of the right. But again, this is something we haven't had a good look at. And even though I would always have a measure of optimism in my surveys, if I was looking at adolescent mental health and wellbeing, optimism didn't make it into the survey. I just didn't have the luxury of the space. Now I'm really regretting it. Oh, well, technically by the time we upload this, it will have been closed. Well, yeah, I mean, technically by the time you upload this, I will have had the time to put in an optimism measure. Collect one week's worth of data. What about any, are there any things that we haven't touched which you've looked at in detail which we, which you've looked at in the survey or what you're trying to look at? I think that's probably, I mean we've got a bunch of expectations and things we can do with it. So for example now that we have data on people's self-injury status for example, we can have a look and see what predicts it. Are the things that are the risk factors that are associated with adult? self-injury, the same risk factors that are associated with youth self-injury. We've also included in the survey a number of sort of throwaway questions which are helpful for, you know, maybe using to just sort of publicize it a little bit. So the first week we asked about Marmite or Vegemite, for example, what's your preference there Sahir? I actually think they both taste very much the same. Right. So you sit with a... I really cannot tell. I don't know where that lands. That's right. So, Theresa, with about 17% of the population, you say they're both yuck. Unsurprisingly, I think, Marmite was a narrow winner there. Veggie Mike came coming in at second place. But one of the interesting things that I had a look at was how that was associated with disgust sensitivity. So there are individual differences in the extent to which people are sensitive to disgusting things. And that's where the title of that first newspaper article comes from. One of the items asks, you know, how disgusted would you be if you saw a piece of food sitting in a rubbish bin covered in maggots, for example? And some people go, eh, don't care. Other people will start to retch at the thought of it. And this may be a reflection of what's called the behavioral immune system. So we have physical, we've developed these cognitive as well as physical responses to things that potentially risk contaminating us. And these extend into the political realm. So people who score higher on measures of disgust sensitivity tend to be less positive about New Zealand increasing the number of migrants that enter the country, because they might be a symbolic contaminant. In the context of Vegemite and Marmite, however, people who said that they prefer Vegemite had a lower sensitivity to disgust. And that's probably because Vegemite as an Australian product might contaminate us with Aussiness. So extrapolating Vegemite equal to maggots equal to Aussies. I wouldn't put it in exactly those terms. Some people are more okay with it than others. Or immigrants equal to, depending on the trends. I mean, it's the same. Cleanliness is next to godliness, right? So there's a moral imperative that comes with some of these things. So then I'm assuming voters of parties who, I guess, oppose immigration and stuff would be voting more towards Marmite if you connect that back to... Yeah. So we do find, reason that we, so we find statistical differences on things like disgust sensitivity. And so people who prefer closed borders are going to be, tend to, tend to score higher on measures of disgust sensitivity. One of the other things I'll be interested in looking at in this survey is we've included a measure of eco-anxiety. So asking people about their emotional wellbeing experiences in relation to their thoughts about the impact of human activity on our climate. And I think this is something which we haven't... really included in the Broad Smorgasbord of things that impact on our well-being. The New Zealand Psychological Society, for example, has a climate psychology task force whose job is to actually come up with a strategy around these kinds of things. Firstly, because climate change is a psychological problem. When you have the behaviour of however many billions of people we have in the world impacting on our climate, that right there... is a question for psychology to help address, both in terms of how we can help to mitigate it, but also how we deal with the consequences at the other end. The Youth 19 Smart Survey included a set of questions for its 9,000 young participants that asked, what are the sorts of things that worry you? And a significant group of those participants said, climate change, I'm worried that we're killing our planet. Politics is a relatively short-term game, so it'll be really interesting to see how in this election, issues around the climate play out. And actually it seems to me that one of the challenges is, it's taking a backseat to people's concern about the here and the now. I think people are being motivated less about what happens in 50 years than whether or not I can pay for my food bill this week. That was pretty rambling. But I'm confident that you can make some gold out of it. Well, the listeners have to make gold out of it. I'm putting it as is. So then considering we've been recording for about an hour, what are the key takeaways so far from what you found? We know that conspiracy belief has slightly increased. And we know, well, the All Blacks aren't doing nearly as well as what they were before. So some of the hard work has yet to be done. So for example, in the context of Theresa's project, we're gonna have to do a whole bunch of pre-work to help us prepare the data for analysis. And that might include things like having a look and coding the types of events that people say that they've been thinking about. There's also the fact that this is only the first part. We'll also be wanting to go back to at least some of these participants after the election, potentially after Christmas and the new year. to actually follow up and see what has changed for them. I mean, in the short term, as I've noted, we've got some data that allow us to test some fairly long-standing kinds of propositions in other countries. So for example, what are the personality level differences between people who vote for parties of the right and those who vote for parties of the left? And actually that shows a lot of things that we know from other research elsewhere in the world. Act and national party voters tend to say they're more conscientious, for example, than voters of the left. At the same time, voters of the left like Labour, Te Pati Māori and Greens party supporters tend to score much higher on personality measures of openness to new experiences. But there's also the novel things that people have never had the chance to look at that I think come from not just asking novel questions in the context of politics or about wellbeing, but actually allowing us to have a look at how those things interrelate. And that's where Theresa's project sits at the intersection of these. emotions, what are the wellbeing consequences of both? That's exciting. I can't wait to get Therese back once. Yep. Therese was saying that she's really excited about the prospect of coming back to talk about it once she's published her work as well. Would you like a little final say as well, a final spiel as well, Therese, before we do the wrap up? I think Mark's covered a lot of it. I'm really excited, obviously, to get more data for my PhD, first and foremost, but also to take a look at some of these questions. And I think I'm really excited to be able to have a sample that we have, a community-based sample, where a lot of research that we tend to do around the university tends to be quite university-based. So having a community-based sample like this and giving people the opportunity to participate is really... exciting I think from a research perspective and also just from a personal perspective. I think one of the things that's always surprised me about these surveys is that my family who claim to love me would not fill in one of these surveys. They take a while, they take 40-45 minutes and yet thousands of New Zealanders are willing to give up their mornings as they sit in bed drinking their cup of tea filling them in. And that's a, I think it reminds me of the kind of privileged position that we have as psychological researchers. Many of the things that we focus on are not just spectator sports, they're not just theoretical. They hold a mirror to people's lives. So also we should end that part there. The last thing which I wanted to do, Mark's done it before. But now this has been a year. This is my own repeat survey, I guess. We'll go through the same set of questions which I had asked you a year ago and Therese as well. Therese's answers are probably more interesting because they're novel. And we can see, and Mark, if you wanted to change anything from back then, feel free. All right. Ready, Terese and Mark. So I guess I'll ask and then whoever wants to go first can go first. You start, you start, Terese. Yep. All right. Okay. All right. Summer or winter. My usual answer is autumn. Um, We should have asked that question in the survey. I'm going to put it in. We're going to put it in for the final week. Um, because we're coming up to something. I'd always go for summer, but I'd qualify it by saying it depends on where you are. If I could have a white Christmas, then winter. Oh, true, true. Yeah. Um, movies or TV? Oh no, TV, definitely TV. Oh, maybe movies. Definitely TV. Can we do that in your service? Submit and then email you, email it back to you being like, yo, I want to change this answer now. I think I'll also go TV, but it's hard. It is a hard one. The ritual of going to the movies I love. I can do that with a TV show. Yeah, and Theresa and I and some of the other people in the lab have been working on some research around horror movies, who watches them and why. So movies are close to our hearts. All right. Then I should ask you another movie question. Um, if your lives were movies, what genre would they be? Horror movie. I wanted to say the same thing. Maybe it's a thriller as the PhD. Truman show. And do you have ideas of who would act as you guys in? your own TV shows, if they were about your life. My answer remains the same, so I'm gonna let Therese go first. No, no, I'll let you go first. I'm thinking of the answer when you look up the name. So my answer, as I'm sure it was the first time around, is Bruce Campbell, who was the star of Evil Dead's One, Two, and Three, but not Evil Dead Rise, even though he does appear in the movie, he actually provides a voiceover. So there you go. Oh. I've never actually thought about this, but I think the first person who came to mind was Sharon Rooney. She was in the Barbie movie recently as one of Barbie's friends. She also starred in a British TV show that is very close to my heart called My Mad Vac Diary that came out like 10 years ago. I think the more interesting psychological question is, Theresa, is why? Do you identify with this person or is it because of? Yeah, I like her work a lot. I've enjoyed it. I also think that we could probably fit the physical remembrance. You've got to have people who look kind of like you, you know? I think they surprisingly did a good job with that with Killian Murphy. Yeah. What about you, Sahit? I'm going to flip it around and throw it back to you. Oh, my life would be a comedy, 100%. There's no question about it. Who would act as me? I feel like I just asked to play my own role. I think I don't think I'd even get someone else to play me. That's a cheating get out of jail kind of answer. Surprisingly, I haven't thought about my own answers to these questions. Maybe I should. I'd like Hasan Minhaj actually. I feel he'd be good. I just like the way he delivers in his comedy sets and stuff. I think he'd be a good. I was going to say the amount of times you've walked into my office and cracked some drugs, so you need to have the comedic timing and be able to play it. I think Hasan Minhaj would be a good one. Moving on. Also, that reminded me, what kind of feedback do you receive on your surveys? I never asked that. No, I'm very grateful for it. I tend to get a mix of... So for this survey, I've been surprised by how few emails I've received. The ones I've received have been a mix of people saying they found it very interesting, which in the context of it being a long survey, I think again, signals just what a moment we're living in, how interested people are in things around what's going on inside their heads. But I do routinely get a number of emails from people who say sometimes nicely, sometimes not so nicely. I'm clearly an idiot and the data that comes out the other end is just going to be complete rubbish. And I think that's one of the, I think it's really important actually for us to be reminded of this as researchers because I think it's really easy coming from where we do to, I know why I've asked the questions that I have. So this is the right-wing authoritarianism scale. That's why I'm asking whether or not people think we should, we need a strong leader who should crush evil and take us back to the path of the righteousness. But I can also understand that would look really weird to someone when it comes out of context. That's good. My only feedback was because I barged into Theresa's office and said, I was like, I didn't, I never had COVID. Why did I get the option to pick that? Um, when I did it. Good. Good to know. Uh, I did my flatmate did the survey for me. I know you said that your family don't do the survey for you, Mark. I feel like the people around me, it's still early days for me. Yeah, they're not traded yet. Well, the funny thing was in the political site class on Tuesday, I was like, well, where's everyone on their laptops while I'm giving a lecture? It turns out they were doing the survey. I'm just going to say my flat back to the survey and when he saw that your email and the phone number for your office was listed, he was like, wow, that's very bold. That's very courageous of you to contact me. Because he thought that the amount of people who were going to contact you would be quite a lot. But as I say, it's actually been more temperate than previous surveys. So I'm really grateful. What's like the most aggressive feedback you've received? Whenever I talk publicly about psychology around climate change, I tend to get some fairly intemperate stuff there. And it tends to revolve around the kind of trope of university academics are part of the hoax that's designed to get them more money, which would be fantastic if it was true. As I was about to say, we're not paid enough to be part of the hoax. Yeah. However, if anyone's willing to pay me. All right, let's go back to the questions. What's your weapon of choice? Say surveys, say surveys. Surveys, surveys, Sahir. Why would we say anything else? The pen, it is mightier than the sword. Well, the answer is it depends. If it's Team Fortress 2, then it's a rocket launcher all the time. If it's a Spider-Man, then a web bomb to me. And does Fall Guys have weapons? No, it doesn't, does it? No. Not quite. Cats or dogs? Historically cats, but now dogs. I love cats, but I wouldn't get another cat because I do worry about their impact on the local wildlife. I live close enough to Zalandi that I wake up to the sounds of birds being chased by the local feral cat population. Which superpower would you like to have? Teleportation would be fantastic for getting out of bed late. But that's, but if I really, something to do with, I don't know, the ability to manipulate the matter of the universe, because then you get time travel as well as a whole bunch of cool stuff. Well, with teleportation. Should I ask then in your version of teleportation, I'm guessing it's you popping up in a different place, but in reality, is it the same you popping up, whereas it a different you because you're breaking your molecules down and having neurons pop up in a different place? Oh, now we're getting into philosophical territory. Maybe I'm just moving the universe around me. Maybe. Mine would definitely be teleportation in order to not have to pay to fly anywhere. I want to travel, but it cuts down the cost a lot. But then also time travel, but I don't know if you've seen the movie about time Very good movie and they got the main characters got the ability to Travel back in time, but in a very specific way and I think if I had time travel that would be the way I would want Yeah, I think yeah. I mean so here knows that I've done. I've actually asked people this question in research surveys and Time travel comes up a lot teleportation comes up a lot. Men are more likely to ask for invisibility though, which I find deeply, deeply worrying. Disturbing. Yeah. Is it mostly young boys who ask for that or? Well, unfortunately, yeah, I've only ever asked sort of university age and above samples, but I'm about to put this into the survey for Sunday. I know what Teresa's favorite type of music is. So. What's your least favorite type of music? What do you think my favorite type of music is? I might have something to do with the one reason everybody was away in an Auckland about last year. Was it last year? It was earlier this year. Yeah. Earlier this year, it was on March this year. It was census night. Like a census night had no one in Wellington. No one in Wellington aged 18 to 25 was in Wellington that day because Harry Styles was performing in Auckland. But yeah, what's your least favorite? I'm really not on the bandwagon of hyper pop. What's hyper pop? Hyper pop is like a, it's extremely electronic and doesn't quite, in my opinion, as someone who's not, I'm not a particularly well versed in music knowledge, but, um, it does not really follow melodies the same way as typical music would. Um, it's a very experimental electronic music, which is not really for me. I think that's my least favorite. I'm not a huge fan of jazz. It's not to say I dislike it. I mean, I like most types of music, but I don't understand it. And I think that's probably part of the problem. When you talk about jazz, you're talking about intense jazz or like a Frank Sopra- I'm thinking, I mean, I tend to think about sort of experimental jazz from the 60s and 70s. The really, really spontaneous type of stuff. But, and I've done research on musical preference as well. I've done research on everything. So I tend to prefer things that are a bit more up-tempo. I vaguely remember you using it when you lectured me way back in 2013. If you were a pizza topping, what pizza topping would you be? I actually, I really like seafood pizzas, but I don't think I'd want to be one because I think they're quite polarizing. So in order to, it depends on the function of me being a pizza topping. You want to appeal to lots of people. So I think something fairly standard, good old pepperoni, bit of mozzarella. I'm just going to say pineapple purely TV polarizing. That was my... And what does this say about your personality? Okay, this is going into the survey. That last week of survey is going to have so many more questions. I'll cycle some out to make room. I kind of remember my... You're being, you're being exactly what people email us about is that you're sitting here trying to figure it out, trying to psychotherapize me with my answers. Yeah. Well, Freud said sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. But then he went on to say, but a joke is never just a joke. Speaking of Freud, what is something ridiculous that someone's tricked you into believing? or doing to for that matter. Don't say a PhD, that would be hurtful. The PhD is a form of self-injury. I think, I think Johannes said that life is worth living or something like that. Yeah, but Johannes used to sort of stop me as I left for the end of the day and say things like, be careful out there, Mark. There are people who want to kill you. So on the subject of pessimism and optimism, I think our Bavarian friend scores high on pessimism. That's true. What a great human. Yes, indeed. I miss him greatly. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? The Greece island of Milos. Yep, the Greek island of Melos stopped off there on the way to a conference last year. It was fantastic. That's a big change in your answer because before that you had said Zimbabwe. Yeah, well, I remember. I mostly grow up. Yeah. But I hadn't been to Melos at that point. I've never been to a Greek island so I can't give a cool answer like that. I'm going to say Amsterdam right now. I love a walkable, cycleable city. Cool. And when's their Taylor Swift concert? straight after the one below, to be sure. Okay, last couple. What is your version of there's two types of people in this world? I prefer the joke. There are three types of people. There are those who can count and those who can't. I'm sorry, Therese. Honestly Therese, I asked this question just to set that up. You don't actually need to answer it. It was purely for your reaction. There are voters of the right and the voters of the left. I don't think there are voters in the middle. Interesting. I'm surprised. The people that I talk to, I think, are one way or the other, but are very much in the middle. Well, on average, New Zealand is a centre left. And research shows that cognitive integrative complexity peaks just left of centre. So the British politician, Anya Mbevin, once said, people who stand in the middle of the road get run over as an answer to the question about why there aren't more middle of the road politicians. All right. On that note, the last thing is if you could give us one piece of advice to leave with, what would it be? sure. Start preparing early for Christmas. That'll definitely reduce the amount of stress. Very smart. Theresa's wondering, where the heck did that come from? And the answer is I've been answering, answering journalist questions about the psychology of Christmas today. I've been so taken aback by all these questions. Advice to give? I'm not sure. Always pick the PhD. Think long and hard before starting. Yeah, think long and hard before starting up for a PhD. Awesome. Oh, thanks guys. Thanks everyone for listening. Two great pieces of advice there. Great slip-by. And yeah, thanks for listening. Until next time, everyone take care. Bye. Thanks Sahil. So for someone who does surveys, which you can only answer once, Therese has asked to come back and change her advice answer. You meant to out me like that. It's funnier this way. I was just going to switch my answer since Sahir brought up my love for Harry Styles earlier. To give a piece of advice would be to quote the great Harry Styles and say treat people with kindness. That's pretty good. And seeing as Theresa's had the chance to change her piece of advice, my piece of advice is always to go with your first piece of advice. Life is too short to rethink what advice you're going to give. Awesome! Thanks guys!