When to Speak Up and When to Stay Quiet & Why Smart Investors Do Crazy Things

Something You Should Know

This episode explores three distinct but interconnected themes: the surprising biology of indoor spiders in autumn, the social psychology behind

Key takeaways

• Vanessa Bonds explains the 'mum effect,' revealing that people rarely warn others about visible smudges despite overwhelmingly wanting to be told themselves.
• Bonds recommends asking for permission before giving feedback, as trusting others to manage their emotional readiness significantly improves communication outcomes.

Main topics

• Indoor spider biology and seasonal behavior
• Social psychology of speaking up versus staying quiet

Notable quotes

"If you get 10 % per year for 10 years, that is not 10 times 10, 100%. It is 150%."

Conclusion

Listeners gain practical psychological frameworks for navigating everyday

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) Today on Something You Should Know, when you see a spider in your house, ever wonder how he got in there? Then, you know those times when you can't decide, should I speak up and say something or just mind my own business? Speaker 3 (0:16) This is a dilemma we ask ourselves pretty much every day. My co-worker keeps mispronouncing my colleague's name. Should I tell them? I see someone crying, but I don't know them. Should I go up and ask what's wrong? Speaker 1 (0:30) Also, the weird thing about the pumpkin in pumpkin pie. And some very bad and very good decisions investors make with their money. Speaker 4 (0:39) One of the most powerful things about investing is the power of compounding. If you get 10 % per year for 10 years, that is not 10 times 10, 100%. It is 150%. So just being in the market in the long term is really valuable. Speaker 1 (0:57) All this today on Something You Should Know. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. 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Download the Vinted app for free and start listing with no seller fees so you keep everything you earn. Speaker 2 (2:17) Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Speaker 1 (2:30) It can happen any time of the year, but particularly in the fall, you might notice spiders showing up in your house. Why is that? That's the topic we're going to begin this episode with today. I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. So every fall, especially, it seems like spiders start showing up inside your home. And so you might naturally assume that they're just escaping the chilly weather. Usually that's not the case. According to the experts at the Burke Museum, most spiders inside your house are adapted to living indoors and may spend their entire lives in or around buildings. And when you suddenly notice more larger spiders wandering around in, say, late summer or early fall, many are mature males roaming around looking for female spiders. In fact, the museum estimates that fewer than 5 % of the spiders you see indoors have ever been outdoors at all. So that spider strolling across the living room floor probably didn't just sneak into your house. There's a decent chance he's been a roommate of yours for a long time. You just hadn't met him yet. And that is something you should know. Speaker 1 (3:52) How many times have you wondered, should I say something or just keep my mouth shut? Should you ask someone what's wrong? Tell them they've got something green stuck in their teeth? Or warn a friend that you have serious doubts about that person they're dating? Or is it just better to mind your own business? We face these little decisions all the time. And it turns out there's some fascinating research on when speaking up is helpful, when it isn't, and why we're often surprisingly bad at knowing the difference. Here to explain what the science says is Vanessa Bonds. She's a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. And she's author of a book called Should I Say Something? The Science of What to Share and What to Keep to Yourself. I think you'll find what she has discovered extremely useful the next time you're wondering whether or not to say something. Hi, Vanessa. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Speaker 3 (4:53) Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Speaker 1 (4:55) So I cannot think of a topic that applies to more people more often than this one of, should I say something, should I speak up, or just mind my own business? Speaker 3 (5:07) Exactly. This is a dilemma we ask ourselves pretty much every day, right? You can imagine my coworker keeps mispronouncing my colleague's name. Should I tell them? I see someone crying, but I don't know them. Should I go up and ask what's wrong? I got a big promotion. Should I tell my friend who's been struggling at their job? Or I've been going through these personal struggles at home. Should I tell my boss? So these really are just really ubiquitous dilemmas. And you would think almost because we encounter these kinds of questions so frequently that they would feel kind of. familiar to us that we would have figured out how to handle them at this point. But what's so interesting is that they do seem incredibly fraught every time and the stakes feel really high. And that's because these sorts of dilemmas threaten our sense of belonging, which is a fundamental human need. Some have even argued it's our most fundamental human needs. So we care about other people. We want to get to know them. We want them to get to know us. And that desire pushes us in this direction of wanting to go and say something, you know, wanting to open up or ask a personal question. But on the flip side, we worry we might say something we shouldn't have and put our foot in our mouths and end up accidentally pushing people away, which is the exact opposite of what we want. So a big question for me as a social psychologist is, how accurately we're able to predict what's likely to happen if we choose to speak up or not in these kinds of situations. And as it turns out, there's actually lots of research on this. And Speaker 1 (6:50) my guess is we're probably not very good at it. Speaker 3 (6:54) Yes, your guess is correct. And the interesting thing is how many different ways we're not good at it. And so one way is something called the mum effect. And mum stands for minimizing unpleasant messages. Speaker 3 (7:14) This is this tendency we have to not want to embarrass other people or make them feel bad or cause them pain. You know, if we tell someone something that we know is going to make them embarrassed in the moment, it causes us physical pain, like it embarrasses us in return. And so we use that awkwardness and that information as a reason to assume that actually maybe they don't want to hear this information or this message. But in fact, in many cases, people want to hear something, even if it's going to embarrass them a little bit in the moment. So let me give you an example. Imagine that you had something in your teeth or, you know, a piece of chocolate on the side of your mouth. You would want someone to tell you, but. When researchers have looked at this, and they've actually done this by sending research assistants out into the field with stuff on their faces, like lipstick smeared on their face or chocolate smeared on their face, they have these research assistants go up to unwitting participants and ask them to complete a survey and talk to them in a way where this person is clearly looking right at the smudge on their face. And they wanted to see, you know, how many people actually say something to these research assistants. And what they found was that hardly anyone told them they had something on their face. They had over 150 people participate in this study and only four people ever said, oh, hey, I think you have something on your face. But when they asked people, would you want this information? Overwhelmingly, people say, yeah, of course I want. someone to tell me that. So that's one way in which we underestimate how much people actually want to hear what we have to say. Speaker 1 (8:58) I'm thinking about times when I've struggled with this and thought it just doesn't quite rise to the level of being worth it. That it's just, what could, what's the benefit of doing this? And maybe there isn't any, and it's just easier to not. It's just easier to not is kind of my refrain, I guess. Speaker 3 (9:19) Yes, absolutely. And this doesn't mean that every time you have feedback for someone, you should give it and just give unsolicited feedback all the time. And one of the things that you noted is what's important is, is this actually useful or beneficial to the other person? So we could take, you know, an example. Let's imagine someone interviews for a position at your job. You're in this group interview, so you see how they do, and there's some critiques you have. You think they didn't give the best interview. You have some feedback that would help them interview in the future. And we can imagine two sort of situations. One, despite the subpar interview, this person gets the job, and they come in, and now they're your colleague, and they work with you. There's really no point in that situation of telling them, you know what, I really wasn't impressed with your interview. That's not going to go anywhere. That's going to make them feel bad with no instrumental gain. But you can imagine another situation where they don't get the job and you have this information that might help them get the next job if they're continuing to interview other places. And that's a situation where actually it does make sense to maybe. call them up and ask, you know, would you like some feedback on your interviewing? Because I was there and, you know, I can give you some feedback if you'd like. And that can actually be really beneficial. And that's the kind of situation where people really do want to hear what you have to say. Speaker 1 (10:48) Well, as you said, though, that there are times when it doesn't really help the other person. But what about that? What about you? Like if there's somebody that's like always mispronouncing your name, you know, telling them isn't going to do anything for them, but it's going to do something for you because don't you hate hearing your name mispronounced? Speaker 3 (11:09) The way I like to think about these kinds of decisions is when we're deciding whether to say something, we're essentially trying to predict three things. We're trying to predict what saying something is going to do for the other person, how it's going to impact the other person, and that's mostly what we've been talking about so far. We also are trying to predict what saying something is going to do to the other person's impression of you, like how they think about you. And so there are a lot of other places where, you know, we worry about opening up and sharing, you know, personal struggles or even successes because we worry we'll come across negatively or as bragging. And we could