In this episode, Adam Walker and I dug into “The Expectation Effect” by David Robson.
You can listen to the episode here:
You can find more about Adam at AdamJWalker.com.
Full Transcript:
Mickey Mellen
According to an increasing number of neuroscientists, the brain is a prediction machine that constructs an elaborate simulation of the world based on as much its expectations and previous experiences as on the raw data hidden in the senses. For most people, most of the time, these simulations coincide with objective reality, but they can sometimes stray far from what is actually in the physical world. So that was a quote from David Robson’s book, “The Expectation Effect”, and here to discuss it today is Adam Walker. So Adam, good to have you back.
Adam Walker (00:27.858)
Yeah, good to be here. I’m glad you started with that quote. That’s the perfect starting point for this conversation. So that’s great.
Mickey Mellen (00:33.507)
Yeah, this whole book, I struggle with this book because it defies logic. I don’t like things that don’t make sense. Like in this case, the book posits and then proves that the placebo effect works, which I struggle with in general, but then they go into how works and say, Adam, I’m giving you a placebo and then it still works. Like, no, it doesn’t make sense. But again, they prove it with story after story. So it was fascinating, but you picked it. So yeah, why don’t you kick things off here and tell us why you picked this book and what it taught you.
Adam Walker (00:58.611)
Yeah, mean, so I’ve kind of long been a believer that our perspective directly affects and shapes our reality. And to your point, like to your opening quote, right, that our brain is a prediction machine and it tends to see what it expects to see, period. mean, like the end of story, like that’s just what it does. And so, and that’s for…
Mickey Mellen (01:20.068)
Yeah.
Adam Walker (01:24.778)
for good or for bad, right? And so if we expect like, okay, so let me back up. So this quote from early in the book was kind of perfectly summarizes this idea, right? So, so -called, quote, complaining good sleepers, which are people who vastly overestimate how much time they spend awake and restless each night are much more likely to suffer greater fatigue and poor concentration during the day while, quote, non -complaining bad sleepers,
Seem to escape the ill effects of insomnia for the purposes of next day performance We sleep as well as we think we did And like like that’s like that’s the like that’s that that lines up with my reality too Like I like there are days where I like I tossed and turned all night It was a terrible night’s sleep and then i’m tired the next day But if I look back at the data because i’m wearing an apple watch at night The data is like no you slept fine. Like what are you complaining? You slept totally like keep like suck it up. You know, what are you doing? so
Mickey Mellen (02:00.762)
Right, that was…
Mickey Mellen (02:05.946)
Mm -hmm.
Adam Walker (02:20.905)
So that is the expectation effect is we tend to experience the world in the way in which we expect to experience the world and our bodies and our minds have a habit of adapting to that expected experience.
Mickey Mellen (02:34.553)
And that makes sense for being tired is kind of a psychological effect as much as a physical one. But the book gets into so many physical effects, like both good and bad, where they had the bone pointing syndrome, where like those tribes that could point to your curse, you’re going to die. And the people would die because their whole body said, it would just start breaking itself down. Or the man that had cancer and said, your cancer has spread, you’ll be lucky to make it to Christmas. And he made it to January, finally couldn’t do it anymore. And it turns out, they were wrong. It didn’t spread at all.
Adam Walker (02:39.572)
Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Walker (03:01.096)
and wasn’t cancer at all, yeah.
Mickey Mellen (03:02.459)
Well yeah, there’s good sides to it too, but like, yeah, a good example I saw in the book about, I guess kind of the good side of it is, I’ll quote here, in one recent study led by Kerry Liebowitz at Stanford University, participants were first provoked with a mild allergic reaction on the skin leading to an irritating itchiness. The participants then remained in the lab for around 20 minutes afterward. With some of them, the researchers checked the state of their skin reaction without much comment. For others, they explicitly described how the rash and irritation would soon go away. Those reassurances became a self -fulfilling prophecy that soothed the participant’s symptoms
They recovered more quickly than the controlled group did. again, that makes no sense. How is a rash going quicker because of your mind? This is the kind of stuff that I said I don’t like because it doesn’t make sense, but again, they have data and studies to prove it.
Adam Walker (03:40.765)
It
I mean, gets like almost sort of like the spiritual and metaphysical, which like, I think you and I both are like, you know, like, no, the way you think is not going to affect the way your body heals itself. But the studies show that it legitimately does. I mean, like even like a bunch of the stuff related to aging, like later in the book, it basically said, look, you are as old as you think you are. Like people that.
Mickey Mellen (03:55.844)
Right.
Mickey Mellen (03:59.855)
Mm
Mickey Mellen (04:08.848)
Mm -hmm.
Adam Walker (04:09.795)
Like I think there was one number I was looking at this morning. It was like people that expected they did a study and it was like, I think it was maybe women and did they expect to have heart problems or a heart attack? And if women expected to have heart problems or heart attack, they were 3 .7 times more likely to have a heart attack versus women that did not like, like it’s just over and over and over again. Like it’s really like, there’s another quote in here. I think with art Alzheimer’s as well, like people.
Mickey Mellen (04:21.232)
Mm.
Adam Walker (04:36.6)
with a more positive, this is the quote, people with a more positive attitude toward their later years are less likely to develop hearing loss, frailty, illness, and even Alzheimer’s disease than people that associate aging with senility and disability. In a very real sense, we are as young as we feel. And so if you expect to be disabled in your later years, you will be. You’ll predispose yourself to that versus if you don’t. So I think a lot of, again, I mean,
Mickey Mellen (05:00.453)
Mm
Adam Walker (05:06.071)
The brain is a prediction machine in so many ways.
Mickey Mellen (05:08.345)
Yeah, it’s interesting just kind of steps through it. Like you mentioned, you know, lot of it is we see what we think we’re going to see just in the world around us. Like I kind of know what books are over on the shelf there and I kind of glance and yep, they’re all there. I can’t tell you exactly what’s there. If you put a new one there, I would totally miss it. So that, okay, I get that. And then sleeping like, okay, our mind thinks we’re tired. So maybe we’ll get more tired. Then get into like, yeah, things like Alzheimer’s and rashes and things that our mind shouldn’t be able to control, but it totally does is yeah, just fascinating to me. What I love is the positive side to this though, cause it doesn’t make sense for a lot of that.
Adam Walker (05:21.601)
Yeah, right.
Mickey Mellen (05:38.667)
But there’s like the ways it can help you. This is a longer quote here, but I thought this was really fascinating too about how this is a good thing. It says,
Adam Walker (06:05.494)
Mmm.
Mickey Mellen (06:08.379)
catching, quote, their nausea might feel unpleasant but could bring you from continuing to consume a potentially dangerous pathogen. Humans are social animals after all and the prediction machine is simply using all the cues it can to prepare you for potential illness or injury. like, idea is if you see someone else throw up and it makes other people throw up, that’s dumb, but historically that might be a good thing, because if someone’s eating something poisonous and you’re eating with them, like, yeah, so it’s, yeah.
Adam Walker (06:31.981)
Well, and I think we’ve all been there like that. You’ve got a family member, that family member’s sick. You just kind of assume that you’re gonna become sick too. And then you start physically feeling sick because you just assume that that’s, you expect that that’s how you’re gonna feel. And then some time passes and you realize, wait, I’m actually not sick. And then magically you’re fine. All the symptoms just went away instantly. And you’re like, that is the expectation of fact. We psych ourselves.
Mickey Mellen (06:41.603)
Right. Mm -hmm.
Mickey Mellen (06:51.515)
Right.
Mickey Mellen (06:59.504)
Mm
Adam Walker (07:01.299)
out in so many ways. like, and part of the reason that I also selected this book is like, I feel like we do this not only with like physical stuff, we do this with with our own limitations. I mean, like it talked a lot later in the book about athletes and the the limitations that athletes have. And basically what it determined is most of the limitations for an athlete are limitations of willpower, not limitations of their their physiology. And like, that’s a really interesting thing to me, because like I
I tend to limit myself a lot as it relates to like, can’t hike up and down that mountain twice. Sure I can, it’s just a willpower issue, it’s not a physical issue, you know?
Mickey Mellen (07:37.847)
Right. Yeah, that was always, yeah, I used to run a lot in the younger days and that was always an issue of, is it my mind or my body? But, I mean, Roger Bannister, they quoted him, the first man to break the four -minute mile, he’s a perfect example of that because no one could do it forever until he did it. And as soon as he did it, there was a tidal wave of people that did it, like, I guess it is possible. it was just, they were trying their hardest. I mean, they weren’t getting a 401 by slacking off. They were giving all they had, but suddenly when he broke four, they were like, it’s possible. And suddenly, I mean, now we’ve had
I can’t remember the number. I thousands and thousands of people have broken that number after he finally did it. So it’s, yeah.
Adam Walker (08:09.281)
Yeah. Well, I mean, another story from a from a very different book from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biography. I forget the title of it now, but he tells about the story where he was a professional, you know, bodybuilder and he would do I think it was like toe raises with like, you know, a couple hundred pounds or whatever. And he was convinced like that’s the human body’s maximum is what he was doing. Like that is he’s at his max. He can’t possibly do any more like the maximum any human can say.
And then he goes and works out with a friend of his that’s also a bodybuilder. And that guy was doing, I think, five times the weight, literally five times the weight Schwarzenegger was doing. And he realized the limitation was completely and totally in his mind. look at David Goggins. David Goggins is the endurance sport superhero and will do insane amount of acts of physical endurance and strength. And he’ll tell you when you feel like your body is done, you have 80 % more you can put into it.
It’s always your brain that’s holding you back. And I think that’s true in so many different areas of our lives. Like it’s our own expectations, our own brain, it’s our own thoughts that are holding us back from the full potential that we have, whether that’s physical potential, whether that’s potential in a conversation or podcast or in our business or school or whatever it is, it’s our own brains that get in the way.
Mickey Mellen (09:24.667)
Yeah, and again, it comes from, you know, just evolution where the last 200 years are so different than the previous thousands. And so, things like that, your body’s supposed to tell you to slow down and conserve energy in case you need to run away from a lion later, which seems rather unlikely for us. And so, I wish I could just, there’s so many things I wish I could tell my body, like, push harder on this run because I have a car at the end, I can drive home after, I can give it all of this, but it won’t do it. Or, yeah, I’m gonna eat this extra cake, but just don’t put it on my hips, because, know, like,
Adam Walker (09:31.496)
Yeah, yeah.
Adam Walker (09:38.429)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mickey Mellen (09:53.415)
I don’t need to save the calories for later, I’ll have more food tomorrow, like, your bodies are kind of dumb in some ways too because those things made sense though, historically, like to save all the fat you can, to save the energy you can, to, yeah, all that.
Adam Walker (09:56.488)
Yeah.
Adam Walker (10:00.617)
Right, exactly. know, one other thing that I love about the book, you’re familiar with the concept of decision fatigue, and that’s why like a lot of folks, and I mean, I do it a little bit too, like, well, they have like one outfit. They’re like, I can only make so many decisions in a day, so I’m only gonna wear this one outfit over and over over again, this one hat over and over and over again, and that saves on my decision fatigue. And what’s interesting is there’s a study in this, this book talks about where people that believed in decision fatigue,
Mickey Mellen (10:09.154)
yeah.
Mickey Mellen (10:15.791)
Dude, I want that. Yep.
Adam Walker (10:30.44)
experienced decision fatigue where the quality of their decisions would go down over the course of time as they made more decisions. But people that did not believe in decision fatigue did not experience it at all. In fact, their decisions weren’t affected by previous decisions. mean, it depends on how you look at it. you can like another interesting thing in this book that I try to share with my kids, because I’ve got some kids that have test anxiety, right? And so like one, I think one study they did in this book as well was like, all right,
When you get stressed out, they would tell the student beforehand, when you get stressed out, studies show your brain is actually gonna perform better than it would if you weren’t stressed out. So you’re actually gonna do better on the test because of your stress. And that one reframe of how they thought about stress actually made the students perform better on the test versus students that got stressed out and then freaked out and then performed worse on the test, because they thought stress was going to undercut their performance.
Mickey Mellen (11:18.691)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (11:26.825)
That’s crazy.
Adam Walker (11:26.974)
And so, I mean, again, it goes back to what do you expect because that’s pretty likely what’s gonna happen.
Mickey Mellen (11:33.883)
Decision and critique is interesting because think with clothing, that’s kind the example there, I suspect some people enjoy the act of going through the clothes and finding the right one so it’s an energizing thing to do whereas me I’m like, what am going to find to wear next? And I would love to just, yeah, have some professional come get me the perfect outfit that just looks great and I can just buy like 10 of them and just be done. It’s classy enough for business, it’s casual enough here, or just give me one of each. Make it easier. I have too many clothes that I never know what to wear. So I have decision and critique because I don’t like…
Adam Walker (11:45.984)
Yeah, same.
Adam Walker (11:57.515)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (12:03.791)
doing that work. so I already know going in it’s going to fatigue me because I don’t want to do it and I’d rather have a simple one. But like my business partner Ali, I’m sure her closet is enormous and I bet she loves it. Like going through and picking out stuff. mean women I think in general enjoy that more than men but yeah. Exactly yes that’s what I’m saying. yeah. But she enjoys that. That’s true. I have no style. That’s the other part of it. Give me a stylist to just make me look good once and I’ll just run with it. So yeah that would be.
Adam Walker (12:05.323)
Exactly.
Adam Walker (12:16.352)
In all fairness, she has way more style than you do too. So mean, there is that, right?
Adam Walker (12:25.131)
Yeah, yeah. I can help you with that, but it’s gonna involve a fedora. just, it’s up to you. Yeah, I like it, I like it. Yeah, so anyway, I I think, I mean, we’ve covered the book pretty well. I think to me, the big takeaway is that we tend to experience the world.
Mickey Mellen (12:29.977)
Yeah, I can’t do that. You’ve already got the hat selfies already taken. I’ve checked. It’s taken everywhere. So yeah, I can’t get in on that one. So it’s too bad.
Mickey Mellen (12:44.868)
Yeah.
Adam Walker (12:53.622)
the way we expect to experience the world. Whether that’s our health, whether that’s conversations, whether, I mean, you know, I think you’re married, you’ve always, like, whether that’s starting a fight when there’s not a fight with somebody, you know, however you’re expecting to experience the world, that’s probably how you’re going to experience it. And I think the more we can own that is probably the better.
Mickey Mellen (13:02.053)
Mm
Right, yeah.
Mickey Mellen (13:10.149)
Yeah, and then, right, and that again, that all makes sense to me. Taking it to the physical level is just, yeah, the part that breaks my brain, but yeah. Yeah.
Adam Walker (13:16.323)
Well, yeah, the nocebo. I did like the studies about how if they did not tell someone the side effects of the medicine, the person experienced the side effects significantly less than if they did tell someone the side effects of the medicine. That was interesting. I mean, the brain is crazy, You have to be careful what you tell people because they will respond to it.
Mickey Mellen (13:25.114)
Mm -hmm.
Mickey Mellen (13:31.215)
Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (13:39.833)
Yeah, I was at the dentist last week after I read this. He’s like, this might hurt a little bit. I’m like, don’t tell me that. Tell me it won’t hurt and then it won’t hurt. it’s, yeah. Read this book.
Adam Walker (13:44.61)
Don’t tell me that. Yeah, tell me, yeah, don’t tell me it’s gonna hurt. Like, either don’t tell me anything at all or tell me this is gonna be fine. Like, you’re good, no big deal, yeah.
Mickey Mellen (13:52.557)
Yeah, well I think as a dentist I kind of assume it’s going to hurt so you need to tell me it’s going be fine. yeah. I did like, yeah, so nocebo is word I had heard before but didn’t really know but it’s like the opposite of placebo and I never knew the root of those but placebo means I shall please and nocebo means I shall harm and so yeah if you think someone else has a rash you kind of get the nocebo effect where it’s going to, you think you’re going to get harmed and so you will even though nothing happened that physically should have caused it and then placebo I think we all know where, yeah.
You take something thinking it’ll help you and it’s not meant to help you but it still helps you because you think it was going to help you. yeah. Which I guess would kind of be like the, even the test, just kind of saying, when you feel that stress, it’s almost like a placebo. You didn’t change anything. You just told them, when you feel the stress, that’s a good thing. Like, okay, I guess it is. Like, you know.
Adam Walker (14:32.205)
Yeah, well, mean, and that’s it. Like a change in perspective can really dramatically affect an outcome like that, you know? And so I think the more we like zoom out and realize like, we can have a different and a better perspective on this thing, a test or whatever, more likely we’re to have a good outcome.
Mickey Mellen (14:39.042)
yeah.
Mickey Mellen (14:50.649)
Yeah, yeah, fantastic book. It’s gonna little shorter episode than normal, but I’m all about not stretching things out for the sake of stretching them out, so, I mean, think we covered what we needed. Yeah, there you go, yeah, we can’t after. We won’t bore everyone with that, but yeah. I mean, I think the little quote to end it on here is yeah, what we feel and think will determine what we experience, which will in turn influence what we feel and think in a never -ending cycle. So, I mean, it’s, yeah, you can keep making things better and better or worse and worse, depending on what you think is gonna happen, because what you think is very likely what it’s gonna be.
Adam Walker (14:59.141)
We can talk about something totally different if you want to. mean, just let you.
Adam Walker (15:19.824)
That’s it.
Mickey Mellen (15:20.559)
So, fantastic. Thanks for suggesting this. Again, not a book I would have picked up because I think it’s kind of hogwash on the surface, but then you dig in and again, they’ve got the studies and all that stuff to back it up and it was fascinating. So, great read. yeah, the expectation effect is well worth it. So, thank you for that. Where can people find you and learn more about Adam Walker and the fedora?
Adam Walker (15:29.785)
Yep.
Adam Walker (15:38.34)
They can find me on the website, adamjwalker .com. It’s got links to everything in my newsletter and everything else, social profiles and all the stuff.
Mickey Mellen (15:44.813)
Awesome. Cool man. Always great to have it on here. Thank you. Awesome. ya.
Adam Walker (15:48.144)
Thanks, Mickey.
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