Rarely do we appreciate the role of chance in history. Even less often do we uncover seemingly insignificant facts that could have initiated a chain of events leading to far-reaching historical changes and events perceptible by all. There is every possibility that the history of social psychology would be entirely different today if not for the trivial and insignificant fact that in the 1970s, Standard Oil’s staff psychologists were paid more than some of its managers. It was precisely this fact, despite initial reluctance, that ultimately convinced a certain manager at Standard Oil to allow his son to change his major at university from mathematics to psychology (Storr 2014). Perhaps if it were not for this simple fact, social psychology would have been deprived of one of its most creative and prolific researchers, an individual responsible for changing the face of the field multiple times and who, in 2013, was given the highest award of the Association for Psychological Science, the William James Fellow award, in recognition of his lifetime achievements.
As a student, Roy Baumeister sympathized with the notion that low self-esteem was at the root of most social problems. This way of thinking was largely propagated by Nathaniel Branden’s blockbuster book The Psychology of Self-Esteem, published in 1969. Baumeister read it, but apart from convincing anecdotes, it lacked science. To fill in the gaps, he started studying the differences between people who think highly of themselves and those with low self-esteem. His interest was partly pragmatic: Self-esteem was a hot topic and a great subject for a young academic beginning his career. His undergraduate thesis explored how people respond to public challenges to their self-esteem. Gradually, however, he felt a growing sense of doubt, which took on urgency in the mid-1980s. On the one hand, it was fuelled by his own research results, which showed that people with low self-esteem are in fact not aggressive and prone to violence, but rather shy and submissive toward others. On the other hand, it turned out that there was very little hard data in support of many popular notions.
In 1996, Baumeister co-authored a review of the literature that concluded that it was “threatened egotism” that in fact led to aggression. Evil, the authors suggested, was often accompanied by high self-esteem. “Dangerous people, from playground bullies to warmongering dictators, consist mostly of those who have highly favorable views of themselves,” they wrote (Baumeister et al. 1996). Such statements turned widely held convictions about the role of self-esteem on their head. In 1999, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) asked Baumeister to lead a team to review the literature in its entirety to see, finally, what effect self-esteem had on behaviors such as happiness, health, and interpersonal success. Their study, published in May 2003, came as a shock to many researchers and practitioners. It concluded that efforts to boost self-esteem failed to improve school performance. Nor did self-esteem help in the successful performance of various tasks. It didn’t make people more likeable in the long term, nor increase the quality or duration of their relationships. It didn’t prevent children from smoking, taking drugs, or engaging in “early sex.” Self-esteem did, however, enhance mood and seems to support initiative (Baumeister et al. 2003).
Apart from self-esteem, Baumeister inquired about the reasons for self-defeating behavior. He concluded that there is no self-defeating urge (as some have thought). Rather, self-defeating behavior is either a result of trade-offs (enjoying drugs now at the expense of the future), backfiring strategies (eating a snack to reduce stress only to feel more stressed), or a psychological strategy to escape the self—where various self-defeating strategies are rather directed to relieve the burden of selfhood.
In 1995, together with Mark Leary, Baumeister co-authored the need-to-belong theory, which seeks to show that humans have a natural need to belong with others. Baumeister and Leary suggest that human beings naturally push to form relationships. The diverse topics they explore in their research include irrationality and self-defeating behavior, the influence of culture and nature on human sexuality, erotic plasticity, decision making, and the meaning of life (Baumeister and Leary 1995).
Perhaps, however, his research on self-regulation and willpower has brought him the most fame and recognition. By taking up these extremely demanding and important issues, he placed himself in the front row of a small group of researchers who restored the once-central issue of strong will to the mainstream of psychology after half a century of neglect. It is hard to overestimate the importance of these studies, as self-regulation processes seem to be crucial in perhaps all areas of our lives. Our success in school depends on them, as does the possibility of achieving our goals, establishing positive habits and fighting against the bad ones. Baumeister has authored a volume on self-regulation, Losing Control, has edited three editions of Handbook of Self-Regulation (Baumeister and Vohs 2004) and has devoted numerous experiments and journal papers to the issue. He also describes this research in a book, Willpower, authored with former New York Times journalist John Tierney.
Recently, he has been absorbed by the search for an answer to questions about the importance of free will and consciousness. He approaches these topics from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. In his view, both free will and consciousness are products of evolution taking place within the context of culture. They are advanced forms of action control that allow humans to act in pro-social ways toward their enlightened self-interest when acting in these ways would otherwise be in conflict with the fulfillment of evolutionarily older drives or instincts.
Professor Baumeister, at the beginning of your scholarly path you were adherent of an ideology that identified the causes of most individual and social problems as low self-esteem, while its enhancement was supposed to be a panacea for all sorts of illnesses. Today you are referred to as the man who destroyed America’s ego. Was your conversion a sudden one, or did it result from a gradual evolution of your views?
It was gradual. I’m not sure how much I believed at the beginning that self-esteem was a cure for everything. I thought it was a positive thing. And then when other people started saying “look at all the good things correlated with high self-esteem,” I started to support them. The research I did was not so much aimed at curing problems or making people better, but rather at understanding differences in social strategies. Solving problems, that was really other people’s work, and I was glad to hear that because it would’ve made my own work more important.
I remember the first hint was from a sociologist at a meeting, who said “how come self-esteem doesn’t seem to ever do anything?” I was surprised, and I responded “no, there are meaningful differences with self-esteem,” and I shared some of my findings with him. But it stuck in my mind that he was somebody who had looked at other findings from the big surveys that sociologists do and noticed that self-esteem didn’t seem to predict much of importance at the societal level. So, I started paying attention to that, and gradually I came to see more and more. But with self-esteem, we were expecting too much from it, that people with high self-esteem were not really better.
The research on aggression was a turning point for me. I was doing research for a book on evil and I’d heard that low self-esteem was associated with greater violence. By then, I knew enough about people with low self-esteem that I was skeptical, because in our work people with low self-esteem lack self-confidence, they avoid risks, they go along with what others say. None of that goes with being highly aggressive, which is a risky dominating strategy, but I believed it because the research was there. And when I started looking at the literature, there was no evidence that low self-esteem was associated with violence. In fact, quite the opposite—the aggressive people were those who thought they were better than everyone else, and they got mad when someone questioned them. That was a pivotal change, a turning point at which I started becoming more skeptical of the benefits of high self-esteem in general.
I remember that California formed a task force about self-esteem and they published an edited book. I read it, and the evidence for the benefits of high self-esteem was pretty thin, even though it was produced by people who were really trying to promote it and advocate it. That also made me skeptical. Next, the APS appointed a number of us to re-evaluate the benefits of high self-esteem. I don’t know if I was a skeptic, but I said “let’s go and look at all the evidence again.” We assembled a team that included some people who were very positive about self-esteem, some who were very skeptical and some in-between. We converged around the conclusion that there were a few benefits, but nothing spectacular.
In your public statements you criticize the so-called authentic self, true self or self-actualization, which is commonly employed by pop psychology and the psychotherapeutic industry. Could you elaborate a little more on your reservations toward these concepts?
There’s a recent article (Jongman-Sereno and Leary 2018) that does a better job than I have of documenting the problems. First of all, the belief that you have a true self that’s different from the way you act is questionable. Second, since everything you do reflect you. While you might sometimes want to distance yourself and say “I didn’t mean that,” or “I don’t wish to be known as the sort of person who does that,” the fact remains that you really did those things. They are expressions of yourself.
The authentic self is a kind of mythical creature. A special journal issue is coming out on this, and many of the papers complain that when people talk about their true self, it might be different from how they view their actual self—but somehow the true self is always good. People seem to think their true self has only positive traits. That’s already questionable, as people who believe they are endowed with “good” true selves go on to behave badly. What I see happening is a convergence on the truth of a sort of ideal or myth that you strive to become, so when you act in a way that’s consistent with that you say “yes, that’s the true me,” and when you act inconsistently with it then you are at a distance from yourself—“ah, no, I don’t want to be viewed that way.” But they’re both the real you.
Fast-forward to skepticism about self-actualization. Again, if it’s the idea that you’re born with some destiny that must be realized, I’m skeptical of that. However, in terms of self-improvement and so on, there is a difference between fulfillment and unfulfillment. I’m not sure that there is only one “you”—you might have a fulfilling life as a father who stays home and raises his children, or a farmer who manages his crops well and produces food, or the same person could find fulfillment as a musician. At the same time, you could fail to find fulfillment doing any of those things as well. What I’m skeptical of is the notion that we’re born or endowed with one particular version of “self” that is different from the way we really are, but you need to become that person. That doesn’t fit with most of what we know about scientific psychology.
Are there really no psychologists or therapists with the capability to decide in an arbitrary manner which of our emotions and thoughts are part of our true self and which are not?
That’s a good question. There’s an article in which two scholars coin the term “inevitable authenticity” (Jongman-Sereno and Leary 2018). Everything you do is a product of you. This idea of true self comes more from the experience of false self-behavior, when you feel that what you did was “not you,” and sometimes you’re pressured to go along with the group and do things that you regret. So there is some legitimacy to that point; again, you really did do those things, you did decide to go along. But we have moments of weakness, or perhaps we didn’t understand the full implications. So I’m willing to give some credence to false self-behavior.
I think there’s a logical fallacy—people think that because there are false versions of self, there must be a single true one. I think there might be multiple true ones, some of which are truer than the false ones, but the fact of having many false selves does not imply that there is one true self. Again, what people often mean by “false self” is that they want to distance themselves from it. They wish they hadn’t done something that they did. We all end up wishing we hadn’t said or done certain things. Maybe there are people who look back at their lives and say “every choice I made was perfect,” but I’ve certainly never met anyone like that. Most of us think “my life’s gone pretty well, but there are things I regret and that I wish I had done differently. I want to distance myself from those things.” The creation of the self is a continuous work in progress.
I know some therapists who are convinced that they can clearly distinguish authentic self from not authentic self…
Good for them. If they could publish research, that would be a valuable contribution for everyone else to know. Another problem with the “true self” in the authenticity literature is that it’s all self-report. We ask people “do you feel authentic?” and yet we know people deceive themselves, they engage in wishful thinking. How can we rely on self-report as the ultimate criterion for whether something is the true or the false self, given that people are wrong?
Self-reports is a big issue in research methodology and we’ll return to it. But I’d also like to ask you about the importance of self-esteem and its defense mechanisms. This is a very prominent research trend in psychology, crowned with such conceptions as terror management theory, according to which the need to maintain and boost self-esteem is the primary motivation underlying most of our behaviors. What is your attitude toward this and similar notions?
I think that’s wrong at multiple levels. First of all, terror management thinks that fear of death is a primary motivation, and that the desire for self-esteem is a derivative of that. I don’t really understand this conception because the higher your self-esteem, the worse death is. If you have low self-esteem, you think have no value. The fact that you’re going to die doesn’t really matter that much. But if you are such a marvelous person, then your death is a huge tragedy.
Here in Australia, the need for positive social identity has been put at the center of some theories of psychology, to explain why people join groups and organizations. But I don’t see why that would evolve. To me, the desire for a positive view of self must be derivative of other motives that are more closely tied to survival and reproduction. The benefits of high self-esteem are very limited. What are those benefits? We looked at great length and found two: initiative, that is, you have more confidence in yourself, and it feels good. But that’s not very much, and the fact that it feels good itself has to be based on something else. Nature didn’t just link something to good feelings for no reason. Good feelings evolved mostly because they’re associated with doing things that help you survive and reproduce. Getting food when you’re hungry feels good, just like getting water and having great sex, seeing your children do well—all these things are associated with positive feelings. Self-esteem contributes very little to any of those.
I’ve worked with Mark Leary on his sociometer theory. A fairly good explanation of the desire for self-esteem is that it’s your inner meter for keeping track of how you’re doing socially—will other people accept you and like you, will they hire you, will they marry you, will they sleep with you, will they take you for a friend, and so on. Those things are important for survival and reproduction, and your self-esteem is your inner measure of how you’re doing on those. But just thinking you’re good without being good is not much help, although it is seductive. It’s a bit like taking a drug to feel like a successful person rather than actually achieving something.
There is also another group of European scholars who said that what counts is not just acceptance by others, but also climbing the social hierarchy. That’s also true. I think they’re quite right that we evolved in primate groups whose higher-ranking members had better chances for both survival and reproduction. So, yes, we humans evolved to strive for success both in terms of being accepted and in terms of getting to the top of the hierarchy; self-esteem is our assessment of how we’re doing and where we’re likely to end up in that regard. So that’s important, and we need to have some internal measure of it.
Defense mechanisms are a sort of flaw in the system. Again, it’s a bit like taking drugs that give you the great feeling of achieving something tremendous even though you didn’t really achieve anything. But the basic mechanism is to get us to do things that advance our standing in the social world that, in turn, improve our prospects for survival and reproduction. Motivation starts with the needs instilled by biology. Creatures who survived and reproduced spread their genes, while others do not, and so psychology’s traits are based on those motivations to do the things beneficial to reproduction.
A counterweight to people who continue to profess the cult of self-esteem and often earn a good deal of money or make careers in science are those who deny the existence of the self at all. As far as I know, you also disagree with them. Could you elaborate as to why?
Wanting to see what the case was against the self, I just read Bruce Hood’s book The Self Illusion (2012). He didn’t make a very good case by saying the self is not quite what it seems. I’d say to some of these people “that’s all good and well, so the next time you have to take an international flight, don’t take your passport and just explain to everybody that selves are illusions.” It doesn’t matter who’s checking boarding passes, just say that to them and see how that goes. It’s ridiculous. Our whole society functions on the basis of those selves, we have possessions and relationships, and people are not freely interchangeable. Even if you don’t know who you’re sleeping with, your wife knows who you’re sleeping with, and if you’re sleeping with somebody else you can try and say to her “oh, well, there’s no such thing as the self.” See how that goes.
Suicide can be quite good evidence of the reality of self. Recalling your thoughts on the subject from nearly 30 years ago (Baumeister 1990), is suicide a form of escape from self?
Yes, I think that theory remains basically correct, but it’s not a complete explanation. There are multiple reasons why people commit suicide. I know of another major theory by my friend Thomas Joiner (2005) in which he’s made a number of excellent points. So again, mine is not a complete explanation. However, it starts with a spoiled identity and the feeling that I can’t stand being who I am. Suicidal thoughts are a way of getting rid of that unpleasant self-awareness. Suicidal people have usually experienced something bad that they feel responsible for, and which reflects badly on the self. So they have an intense, negative awareness of themselves, and like with other kinds of escape from self-awareness they resort to something to blot out that awareness. Suicide, even an unsuccessful attempt, usually takes you out of your life, and during the attempt, it focuses the mind very narrowly on the here and now. It takes you away from the more problematic aspects of self. So, yes, people do all sorts of things to escape from awareness of themselves, especially when that awareness is bad.
Your first iconoclastic text concluding that the perceived importance of self-esteem is overrated was probably the chapter titled “The Self” in The Handbook of Social Psychology, published in 1998. It was followed by more texts in the same vein. After more than a quarter-century, would you say that you succeeded in “destroying America’s ego” and that self-esteem is today merely a historical curiosity?
No. I and other people have raised some questions. I was surprised to see journalists using that title, but then again, a headline is a way to catch attention. So it was amusing, but it’s certainly not how I think of myself. I don’t remember what my first published work questioning self-esteem was; I think the Psychology Review article “The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem” might have been the first one (Baumeister et al. 1996). Anyway, in terms of where we are today, the questions that I and many others raised have put something of a damper on it, but schools still talk about boosting kids’ self-esteem. They still think it’s important, but I think that’s a misguided effort. I think it’s actually destructive in some ways, as I’ve come to think that self-control is much more valuable for solving problems.
Good self-control is good for both the individual and society. High self-esteem, if it’s good at all, is good for the individual. If you have someone with an inflated view of self, it might be nice for them, but the costs are borne by the people around them. If you’ve ever worked with somebody who had a big ego and thought they were God’s gift to the world, you know what I’m talking about. It’s difficult to get along with those people. However, self-control is good for everyone. And so my advice to schools, parents, coaches, teachers and everyone else is “forget about self-esteem and concentrate on self-control.”
The cost is in practice when parents get so worried about their children’s self-esteem than they don’t want to criticize, and so they don’t do the things needed to build self-control, which is to set rules and insist that the child live up to them. Instead, they just tell their child “Dude, you’re perfect. You’re wonderful. You’re doing everything great.” And that’s a harmful message.
Why, in your view, do some psychological conceptions enjoy such tremendous popularity despite research results that consistently negate them?
The self-esteem movement was very enjoyable to participate in as it’s fun to think about how great you are, sit around in a group where everyone tells everyone else how wonderful they are and “this is what I like about you.” I sometimes joke that American schools have always been looking for ways to get students to learn better without actually having to do more homework. So this idea came out: “Well, we could just tell kids they’re good at math, and if they believe they’re good at math then they’ll be better at math. They won’t have to do the math homework.” But I don’t think it works.
You really have to do the math homework, but certainly spending an hour taking turns about saying how wonderful we are and appeasing each other as opposed to spending an hour doing math is going to be much more fun for everyone, including the teacher. So I can understand why it’s popular. I just don’t think it really does any good.
Jeremy Freese said that such conceptions are more vampirical than empirical because they are unable to be killed by mere evidence. But to conclude the conversation on self, self-esteem and self-defense mechanisms, I would like to ask you about the attitude of the scientific community to your views. After all, they contradict many widely held opinions. Is it difficult to be a scientific dissident?
Yes, it’s certainly difficult to be a dissident of any sort and yes, the creativity of science comes from people questioning what’s there and coming up with alternative theories. Many of these alternative theories turn out to be wrong, but we need to have them. It is difficult to be in that position, especially when other people like the dominant theories, or people made their careers doing things a certain way and you say “no, you need to do things differently.”
And also, it’s fair to expect a heavier burden of proof being put on the dissident. If you’re questioning something that everyone believes, you need more data than if you’re going along with the mainstream because often what everyone believes is correct, or at least it’s the best that we can do now. We need people to question and challenge. But it is fair to say “you need stronger evidence if you’re going to go against what everyone has been thinking.”
In your research, you seek answers to great fundamental questions that have been the subject of philosophical considerations for centuries, and which went neglected by psychology for decades. I am thinking here mainly of willpower or free will. In my eyes, this is an expression of great courage, because it is safer and easier to conduct research on academic intelligence, which will certainly give publishable results, than to risk failure trying to answer such difficult questions. However, apart from courage, there is also the practical aspect of conducting such research. Many of my interviewees admit that they would never receive grants for doing research on what they are really interested in, because the preferences of the institutions responsible for making decisions about funding were completely different. When applying for funds, they often had to compromise. How is it in your case? Is it easy to obtain funds for research in which such difficult questions are asked?
It’s tough. The work on self-control and self-regulation did do fairly well with funding, but in general that’s correct. To go against established views and even to switch to new topics, which I’ve tried to do—that is difficult to get funding for. I briefly was going to be a philosophy major. I went to university to do mathematics first, and then I wanted to do philosophy. When I went into psychology, as a sort of compromise, I thought “well, what if maybe we should do that?” I did my laboratory work, the basic work you need to establish your credibility as a scientist. Then, I was able to write a series of books addressing various big philosophical questions. With social science, data is one of the things that got me into psychology in the first place. I had been reading moral philosophy. And when I read Freud, instead of trying to analyze the concepts of what is right and what is wrong and how we know if something is truly virtuous, Freud’s approach was: “Let’s look at how people actually learn concepts of good and bad, right and wrong.” I thought, “that’s a great way to approach and get data. You can address the same problems with a fresh look.” I’ve tried to do that.
My first book was on identity, a book on human nature. I do have thoughts of doing a free will book at some point. Willpower doesn’t really address the grander issues of free will, consciousness. So, I am working around or through these notions in a way, but I’ve also had in mind that I do these big philosophical projects just on the side. I do them as literature reviews, because they require big thoughts, and you can’t do an experiment to settle the meaning of life. So I’ve kept my laboratory, working on one or two problems over time. For 20 years, I had two main themes in my laboratory: One was work on self-control, self-regulation, ego depletion, and the other was rejection and belongingness. I managed to get grants for one or the other, going back and forth, and that was enough to fund the laboratory.
But my work didn’t actually need grants. It was nice to have them, but I was able to do psychology just with the subject pool in the laboratory facilities. And as long as there was support for Ph.D. students, then I didn’t need grants. I’ve had grants more or less continuously since 1992, the last one ended just about a year ago, so I don’t have a grant right now. But for a long time, one seemed to come along after another. I thought that each one might be the last, and I moved to Florida State partly because they gave me a good research budget. That meant if I didn’t have a grant I could still pay for research expenses that came up.
What strategy for raising funds for research should young researchers adopt today? Formulate their research questions directly regardless of the attitude of the institutions granting funds, or rather try to adapt to fashionable research trends?
This is a challenge. I want to encourage young people to do what they want and to do the science based on their own best ideas, but to the extent you need funds to do that you have to adapt. And I think it is legitimate for the government or the funding agencies to say “these are our priorities and if you don’t want to do research on this, we’re not going to give you a grant.” Many people find ways of compromising. So you say, “my research has a little bit of relevance to cancer, so I could get a grant from the Cancer Institute and do some work on cancer. But for part of that I can also do what I want, something more creative and in line with my own ambitions.” I think that’s legitimate, and that’s not taking advantage of the system—it’s working with the system so that we supply the kind of research that the granting agency wants while also getting our own work done.
In some fields like social psychology, it’s not absolutely necessary to have grants to do some research. But if you’re in a field that simply needs grants, you have to go along with what’s available. There are many sources of grants, not just the government and private foundations. I’ve had grants from a range of groups, including those. It’s something you have to be aware of because their priorities change. In America, the National Institute of Mental Health was a main funder of social psychology for decades, and then at some point they just stopped and said “we’re not going to do that anymore.” A lot of people who were working with that system suddenly were left out with no grant money. The government doesn’t care about social psychology. They’re trying to think about how we can make society better. So they thought, “we need to spend money on mental health and maybe social psychology can help with that.” Then at some point they looked it over and said “all this money we’ve spent on social psychology has not really helped the mental health of our country, so let’s not spend on that anymore.”
So, I told some of my young people “maybe look at physical health. Maybe there’s something we can do there, certainly problems like addiction have a psychological aspect.” Addiction is a good subject that’s not going away, and there are a lot of things to learn about it tied into self-control and self-concept, and many other things you can study in connection. There’s also things like arthritis or diabetes, many things have behavioral aspects. So you have to find a way to link what you want to study with what the government or some private foundation sees a need for in society and wishes to put money into.
Changing the subject: today many philosophers and scientists, including some of my interlocutors in this volume, say openly and directly that free will is an illusion. You yourself have devoted a lot of energy to research on free will, and, as far as I know, you’re of the opposite opinion. What are your arguments for free will?
I was interested in it for a while. I got the idea because I was interested in self-control and rational decision making, two important forms of free will. It turns out that the people who say there’s no free will—and I have debated with several of them—more or less agree with me about the psychological processes that are involved. It’s just a question of whether these should be called free will or not. I think it’s really not much of an argument worth having anymore, but more a semantics dispute. If the people who are against free will tend to think that free will means that this is an exemption from causality, or that we have a soul that causes behavior independent of physical and psychological causes, I don’t believe any of those things. So I agree with them saying that there’s no free will in that sense.
The people who believe in free will say “it’s just the ability to act differently in situations,” and I very much believe in that. In fact, I’m not sure you could do psychology without believing that people have the capability to act differently in the same situation, that people make choices and that there are real multiple possibilities. Moral judgment essentially is “should I have acted differently in that situation? Did I do the wrong thing? I should have done something else.” It’s based on the assumption that you could have done something else. Moral judgments seem predicated on this basic kind of free will.
The questionable aspect to me is not so much the freedom part, but the will part. Is there such a thing as a will? There is an agent. Humans have evolved ways of controlling our behavior and deciding what to do that are qualitatively different from other animals. We can project into the future and we can invoke moral principles, we can do economic calculations. We can have long-term commitments and considerations and then change how we act on the basis of that kind of thinking. So that’s the reality. Whether you call that free will or not is just a semantic argument. So I don’t debate free will much anymore. This is funny, I’m giving a lecture on it tomorrow and that’s what I’m going to say. But I have talked at some length about these processes and how they evolved, and why they are different from what other creatures have. It’s not clear that other animals really have a full-blown moral sense the way humans do, nor the ability to represent the future in terms of multiple possibilities. Again, that seems limited to human beings. That’s the psychological reality, the exciting puzzle. Whether we call it free will or not is kind of a sideshow.
Your search for answers to basic questions about the meaning of human existence was directed by your childhood inclinations toward the Bible, and as you’ve mentioned, as a student you become fascinated by the writings of Freud. What is your attitude to these early sources of inspiration today? Do they play any role in your search for answers?
I’m not sure the Bible was a big inspiration. I was brought up in a moderately Christian family, but my parents weren’t very strict about it. They sort of believed, but they didn’t go to church very much. They made me go to Sunday school, which I found terribly boring. At some point I said, “can I just stay home and read the Bible instead of going to Sunday school?” Being Protestant, they thought that sounded reasonable. So I read the whole Bible cover to cover. But I’m not sure it was a huge inspiration to me. I did wonder about the teachings, and I was questioning and skeptical from an early age.
When I was studying philosophy, I was also interested in religion, and I wondered whether all the religions of the world could just be products of the human mind, or of other psychological needs that made up all these religions. I think the answer is yes. That doesn’t mean that they’re all false. They contradict each other, so most of them are false, but there could be one “true” religion. But even then, the reason we believe is because of our own psychological inclinations and propensities. So, to me, religion is not a big inspiring source of the meaning of life.
Freud had a big influence on my thinking. I admired the discipline and the wide-ranging scholarship and the careful reasoning. Freud is kind of fading away from psychology, and over the course of my career, we’ve heard less and less about him. When I was a student in the 1970s, we still had many lectures about Freud, people still talked about him a lot, often to disagree or to say he was wrong about things. But he was still an important presence. Even when I started working as a professor, there were those who really used Freud as the foundation of their clinical practice, who thought he was the foremost thinker. He certainly did advance the field. I think what happens is that the things someone like Freud is right about get taken over gradually by other people, and so they cease giving him credit for them. They start to focus mainly on the things he was wrong about, and so they were gradually discredited and forgotten, so nobody in psychology talks about Freud anymore. Maybe I wouldn’t say “nobody,” but I read a lot of psychology, and I go to conferences to talk about things. It’s very rare to hear anyone mention Sigmund Freud anymore.
So that approach has faded away, but it gave some inspiration to me in terms of meaning of life. Freud was a big thinker, saying things like “love and work would be the two main things.” I periodically go back to that and think about meaning of life. Freud was very skeptical of religion. To some people, obviously, the meaning of life is not religion, but there aren’t a lot of other things on top of loving and working. I’d say Freud shaped my thinking. I don’t go back and reread or cite him, but he still has a lasting influence on my thinking. The Bible—not so much.
For me personally one of the most shocking results of your research is how it demonstrates that psychology and social psychology in particular has become a science of self-reports and finger movements (Baumeister et al. 2007). I expected you work to shock the world of researchers, especially considering how, in the middle of the decade, it was proclaimed as the decade of behavior. Was this in fact the case? Did the scientific community perceive it as a cold shower, or did they remain silent?
The paper’s been cited over a thousand times, so a lot of people noticed it and read it. I’ve heard many people agree with it and many others say that it was wrong. Recently, several other articles have come out saying it’s intensified. I’m not sure how much you’re up on what’s going on in psychology lately, but there are many concerns about replication and statistical power and so on which have led people to say “okay, everything has to be giant samples now and the only way to get giant samples is to do these big online surveys.” As a result, all of what social psychology does anymore is people sitting at computers making ratings, and personality psychology’s not much better. Although they have started to map out and go into big data and look at who becomes more successful, who lives longer, and who earns more money. So, personality at least is moving beyond that, but social psychology is the science of finger movements, and it’s getting worse.
The Mechanical Turk online sample and the outsourcing in recent articles has become 90% of what’s being done in our top journals. It’s a long way from where social psychology started with the Milgram studies, Schachter and Singer’s work on emotion, and the Darlene-Latané bystander intervention studies. A lot of effort was put into staging an experiment. You ran people one-on-one, the participant would come to the laboratory for an hour, and you set up an elaborate experience. You manipulated this way and that and observed actual behavior.
I want to emphasize that there’s nothing wrong with the ratings and the finger movements. We learn from them too. But for that to be the only thing we do, I think we are losing a lot. A scientific field is strong when it has multiple diverse methods. There’s no perfect method in the social sciences. If you want to learn that something is true, the best we can do is to get converging evidence from multiple methods. So when we start to all fall back on the same method all the time that weakens the field. The way I look at social psychology, in the 1970s when I went into the field it was rather narrow. There were only a few methods and a lot of work was done on just a few topics. So it was really not that intellectually rich a field.
I remember how disappointed I was in graduate school, especially coming from philosophy, where the ideas are much more developed and conceptually sophisticated, and I thought, “I’ll just have to make do.” But then in the 1980s there was this great methodological expansion. And we need to study more different things. Since we can’t do an equally good job of everything, we need to adjust to study, for example, social aspects of memory, since we have excellent methods there that have to be just perfectly done, everything has to be right. But if we study marriage, we can’t randomly assign people to be married or track them over the years. We have to lower the standards, but we can’t not study marriage, that’s no solution. Today the thinking seems to be “no, we should not study anything that we cannot do with these big online samples.” I think that’s going to be a weakness in the field. I’m less optimistic about the field than I have been at other points throughout my career.
About a year ago, a Polish scientist, Dariusz Doliński (2018), replicated your research. And the Social Psychological Bulletin in which its results appeared invited researchers to engage in discussion and devoted an entire issue to this subject. Have you read his work and the discussion it evoked?
Yes, I read that one. In fact, they may have even sent it to us to review, or they asked if we wanted to write a comment. I consulted with my co-authors and we were glad to support what he was doing, but we didn’t really have anything new to say about it ourselves. But yes, his is one of the papers saying that the situation has gotten worse.
Can the abandoning by psychology of behavioral studies and the turn toward introspection be considered one of the causes of the crisis in psychology discussed so openly in recent years?
Both those things are happening, but I don’t know that introspection is the cause of it. I think the crisis probably had different origins.
What, in your opinion, are the fundamental causes of this crisis?
I don’t think there is cause for people to question what we’re doing in general. There were the cases of fraud. Diederik Stapel was a particularly disturbing one because it wasn’t just one person doing one fake study here and there. He was an established researcher who did a lot of fraud, he won awards and was very productive, people looked up to him. Some people are faking data. Another source of the crisis, without fraud, was Daryl Bem (2011), who published an article on precognition, a sort of extrasensory perception. Some people just say there cannot be any such thing. So the fact that he could get these results shows that our research methods are flawed. I’m not sure I agree with that argument, but I see their point.
And then some people started doing replications. There’s one by Nosek, a hundred studies or something like that. His group ran a bunch of them. But then many of them didn’t work, which again increased the sense of crisis. People have got the idea that everything should replicate all the time as if there are laws of psychology. Replication is a concern. Still, everyone presumably learned in methods classes that a null finding is inherently ambiguous.
For this younger generation of researchers to think “if something doesn’t work out for me it can’t be my fault, it must be somebody else’s fault,” that’s probably the product of the self-esteem movement. My feelings are ambiguous.
I’m not a historian of science, and I don’t know why some things just come together, but I know there are things that do replicate and things that don’t. We replicate other people’s work, and often we get a finding, but sometimes we don’t. I think the modern thing is to say “it must be them, they must be faking their data like Diederick Stapel,” but I don’t think that way. I’m more of a literature reviewer than most scientists. I write a lot of large literature reviews, I read a lot of other people’s work, and I cite it. So I have a more positive attitude toward social scientists in general than other people. I know other scientists, even some of my friends, who are hardly interested in anything other than what they and their friends are doing, and they think what everyone else is doing is stupid and wrong. Fine, then they’re not going to write literature reviews. But I am, because I want to see the big picture. I have to believe that most social scientists are decent people trying to do a good job and find the truth.
To me, the biggest danger is political bias, not erratic replication. A lot of social scientists have strong political views, and they view their research as a way of advancing social justice. In my view, it’s hard to do that and pursue the truth at the same time. I’m not into political views and social justice and all that—I just want to end up knowing what’s right, and I don’t mind revising my opinions. If you have a political investment, this is like having religious beliefs—but most social scientists aren’t religious. If you’re invested in some political view, then you don’t want to find out any contrary facts, and you want to set up the experiment to get things your way. I think most social scientists are doing reasonable work as best they can and trying to find the truth, with the exception of the people who have strong political biases. I think that’s the biggest threat to the integrity of the field, more so than the replication issue.
When discussing issues related to the crisis in psychology, we must keep in mind the doubts that have arisen from the reputation of the research that underpins your ego depletion theory (Baumeister et al. 1998). Do we have more data today to dispel these doubts more unambiguously?
I recently wrote something on that which thousands of people have read (Baumeister 2019). Ego depletion been found over and over again on multiple continents and in multiple different samples and contexts. Well, some people haven’t got it yet, perhaps it’s an issue of timing. But by the time two or three different independent labs get the effect, there has to be something real there. I think the people who are trying to discredit the whole field think ego depletion is a good thing to attack because it’s one of the best replicated findings. They could say “well, there is something that’s been found several hundred times, but it’s still wrong.” If they said that it would go a long way toward discrediting everything in the field. But to me that’s ridiculous. Something that’s been found several hundred times has got to be real. There’s no way that there could be a conspiracy to produce that much fake data, nor could it be capitalizing on chance or any other source. The theory could be wrong, but there is definitely a real phenomenon there.
The notion it was capitalizing on chance was more or less devastated by that paper by Friese (Friese et al. 2019), who pointed out that if it were chance, there would be just as many significant findings in the opposite direction. So you have around six hundred significant findings showing that depletion makes you do worse things. There should be an equal number showing that depletion makes you do better things, to demonstrate capitalizing on chance. Journals would be eager to publish those because they will have greater novelty, but there are only two—one of which is mine, and one by other researchers. They’re both sort of interesting exceptions. So that idea that it’s some kind of chance or distortion of public publication bias is preposterous. I honestly can’t understand how any sincere honest scientist could question the reality of ego depletion.
Looking at what you do from a broader perspective: Is there any particular type of criticism aimed at you that you feel is particularly serious and justified?
The best alternative explanation for ego depletion was not a complete alternate explanation. It’s an alternative to the resource depletion idea. It’s mentioned in an obscure article by some researchers from upstate New York (Ampel et al. 2018). I reviewed it for several other journals and argued that they should publish it, but they didn’t. The journal usually get a brain person saying “oh, we already know all this,” so they rejected it. But after a time it finally got published somewhere. It’s a really interesting idea, that it’s not that the brain has used up too much glucose or other fuel, but rather that maintaining high glucose in a certain area is bad for the neurons. For example, people with diabetes eventually lose sensation in their feet because of high levels of glucose. If you keep high levels of glucose over a long period of time that damages the nerves, and for that to happen in the brain could be very bad. I know it’s the case that alcohol kills brain cells too, and the brain is pretty adaptable, but if you somehow burned out all the nerve cells in your self-controlling area that would be bad. So maybe the reason people show depletion is that they’ve just exerted self-control. They want to let the cells cool off, so to speak. It’s not running out of resources, but rather the brain wants to let the level of glucose diminish to avoid harming the cells. I think that’s the best alternative theory that I know.
In terms of the work on belongingness and rejection, I mentioned the idea that your self-esteem is about hierarchy, not just acceptance and belongingness. Sedikides and Gebauer (2014) have put forward this theory. I think that is a valid point and I’ve changed my opinion to incorporate that view.
Your question’s a bit difficult for me to answer because I never start off thinking I know what’s right. So I read other people’s criticisms and I say “oh, yeah, they’re right,” and I include that into my own thinking. This happens a lot. In terms of where we are now, I learned there was a paper criticizing the glucose idea about 10 years ago, saying it’s really not about running out of glucose. It’s more about allocating it because the body has plenty of glucose stored. And I thought “that’s completely right.” So I’ve changed my thinking to adopt their theory.
They thought you could omit the limited resource notion. But I think you usually have selective allocation for a resource that is precious, and when a resource really is unlimited then you don’t need to allocate it carefully or selectively. There has to be some cost or some problem for allocation to be selective. Like I said, my theories are constantly being revised, and when someone comes along with a serious point or criticism that I agree with, I adopt it. I have this body of work on the theory of prospective thinking, and there’s been some serious criticism of that.
I talk a lot about sex and gender. People object to that, but they often seem to be politically motivated. The issue of sex and gender is so politicized that I’m thinking I don’t really want to work on that area. It’s too hard to be open-minded, to just look at the facts from all sides. There is a sort of societal commitment to believe a bunch of things that are ridiculous when looked at as scientific hypotheses, but anybody who dissents gets hunted and denounced, and is subjected to character assassination. To me as a literature reviewer that’s a sign, when people who raise contrary views are attacked and silenced. As gender goes, the field has had journal articles published and then retracted based on political pressure. These are clear instances of censorship, which is a red flag that there’s no intellectual freedom there, and I think that’s unfortunate.
I know that in America issues of race are very carefully guarded too, but for my project I’m trying to understand what human life is all about. I can dispense with race to an extent because most interactions are with one’s own race, and the interracial things are somewhat marginal, but I can’t do without gender. If I want to really understand what human life is all about, male, female, or undecided, that’s a big part of everyone’s life. So I really had to delve into that.
What research problems you are trying to solve to these days, the issues you are presently engaging?
These days I’m writing a book on the self. I’m trying to pull together what I’ve learned in many different areas of self over the years, self-esteem and self-control, and other things like self-presentation. I hope to have a first draft done by the end of the year. In terms of new data and theorizing, I have been thinking about the future, this has been an interest of mine in recent years. I recently had a grant application turned down, which was for how people think about the future. That issue goes to some of the most basic aspects of the human mind and the ways in which our minds are superior to those of other animals. It goes along with understanding the self, understanding consciousness and free will and all those things. Linking across time, narrative understanding, mapping out the multiple possibilities in the future rather than just trying to predict the one thing that’s sure to happen. That’s been a lively and interesting field of study.
I have various small projects with scholars in different places. These are moving along at different speeds. We just had one paper accepted on soccer, based on the World Cup (Nezlek et al. 2019). That was sort of an intriguing little project during the 2014 World Cup. They surveyed people in different countries about how much corruption there was in FIFA, and it turned out that countries which had more corruption themselves saw less corruption in FIFA. The ones who were the most outspoken critics of FIFA being corrupt were the countries that were lower in terms of corruption, they’re shocked by it. For people who live in countries where you always have to pay bribes and everyone’s corrupt, the idea that the football organization was corrupt didn’t really seem to bother them that much. But countries where you don’t pay bribes and so on were shocked at this. I’m doing a variety of smaller things like that.
My thought moving forward is to write big literature reviews and books, as I’m getting older now and I don’t have that much time left. I want to tackle the big questions, so I’m also cutting back on working with Ph.D. students. You need to take care of them and have them do narrowly focused studies, then try to publish them so they can get jobs. You end up working with small questions and writing things up. Some papers are just “good” but there’s pressure to publish, even if things didn’t work out so well you want to salvage something from it. I think I don’t want to do as much of that, and in my remaining time, I want to do the big picture thinking, try to pull together grand issues. I’ve got several ideas for books to do on cultural change, and I wouldn’t mind actually doing another meaning of life book. The one I did in 1991 is still selling pretty well and it’s my most cited book in the scientific literature, but there’s a lot more evidence to work with now. Presumably, I’m more mature as an intellectual, so it would be interesting to revisit those ideas and questions and write an all new book on that topic.
Sounds interesting. I would like to discuss with you some more general issues. In your opinion, what crucial questions have psychology managed to answer so far?
That’s a hard one. A conversation I had with Richard Wiseman comes to mind. He was going on a panel with people from different disciplines, and they said they were going to ask everybody “what has your field really learned in the last ten years? What’s the biggest advance?” They wanted us to say what we thing psychology’s biggest advance in the last 10 years is, but there’s so many different things in psychology going on that it’s hard to pick a big one. We had trouble coming up with anything, and when I saw him again the next day I said “did you think of anything?” He said “yeah, I think what I’m going to say is what we’ve learned last 10 years is how little difference the brain makes.” I thought that was really quite a profound idea as we’ve spent enormous amounts of money on studying the brain and we’ve learned a lot about which part of the brain is relevant to this or that, and yet it changes our psychological theories very little.
This is something I’ve noticed for a long time. I remember exchanges where we had trained experts come to the summer institute where I worked, and they would talk about what we learned about the brain, and other people would say “how does that change how we think about marriage or people’s attitudes?” And he said “well, it doesn’t, really.” I don’t want to put words in Wiseman’s mouth, but my take is that the brain is basically responding to its environment. It’s not an independent cause, it’s not the root cause.
I think many psychologists had the idea that once we understand the brain, we won’t need all the rest of psychology. And that is completely wrong. Even if we understand perfectly how the brain works, it’s just responding to what’s happening in the environment and we’ll still need to understand marriage and aggression and helping and all those other things. The brain is just a mediator that really can’t even afford to change things very much. It more or less has to see the world precisely as it is, because distortions will be maladaptive and you’ll react in the wrong way. You’ve got to see what’s really there and deal with it.
Some of the big changes in my lifetime has involved the shift from the socialization and Freudian theories of the 1960s to a much more biological approach. Yet that was oversold too. For a while, people were saying “everything is genetic,” but in fact genes are just one part of it. The gene-environment interactions seem to be by far where all the action is. We are born with strong predispositions to act in certain ways, but the environment can turn some of them on and off and change them, and they don’t usually revert.
I could talk about gender differences that men and women might start out with certain different inclinations. Most societies in history would have exaggerated those and steered men and women into completely different lives. Our modern society is the other way around, trying to eliminate the differences and treat boys and girls the same, teach them to be the same and so on. Society can do that, make natural tendencies bigger or smaller. It doesn’t usually reverse them. There are very few societies where gangs of middle-aged women are roaming the city, getting into fights, beating people up and burning things down and so on. These reversals don’t happen. But I think understanding how biological nature and social situations work together has been a big advance. I think a lot of the advances of psychology are at a much more specific level, and I think we’ve learned and done a lot of things. But as for grand problems, I’m not so sure.
Which serious questions in our field still remain unanswered?
Consciousness is still very difficult to understand. What the philosophers called the hard problem of consciousness is how physical items like brains can produce subjective conscious experience. We have almost no idea about that. I think we’ve learned a lot about evil and violence and helping. I’d say where we are is not that questions are totally unanswered, but that we have tentative answers for many things. Some of these answers are better than others, and they’re likely to last longer than others.
We’ve certainly learned a lot about male and female. We’re distorting it because of political correctness biases and those things, but nevertheless we have certainly learned a lot. We’ll see just how durable those things are in the future. It’s not so much that questions are unanswered, but some of the answers are wrong.
You mentioned that we have many tentative answers, and in general, psychology as science is not a very consistent system of knowledge. Do you think we will finally achieve a wide-ranging theory that incorporates the achievements of psychology into a uniform system of knowledge?
Not in our lifetime, that’s for sure. I don’t see any of the social sciences moving toward an integrative theory. I think there’s good progress. There’s lots of little pieces and I would like to think that someday it will happen, but let’s go back to all the studies with rats, the place where psychology was just before I came into the field. We learned a lot from reward and punishment, partial reinforcement schedules, and all those things. That’s pretty basic and valid—but the idea that it would explain all of human behavior was ridiculous. Still, it was definitely some true and valid knowledge.
Now, in the psychology of people there is the issue that people may change. How much people can change is an open question but, for example, people today are much more tolerant and less aggressive than in the past. Change has to happen but change then makes theories obsolete. There might be some true theories that will then cease to be true in the future. But there should be some commonalities.
What is your opinion about artificial intelligence? Do you think it will help us to understand human beings somehow, or it’s irrelevant, or something else?
I have not really followed it very closely. My approach as a literature reviewer is that usually there’s some valid points and they are usually overstated. Artificial intelligence is a clear example of that. Certainly, we’ve learned some things about human intelligence from it, but it’s not going to provide all the answers by any means just by virtue of being artificial. The way a computer thinks is not necessarily how people think. When a computer plays chess, it really thinks through every possible move and all the contingencies. It can compute those because it has great power, but the human mind can’t do that. The human mind plays chess by some other procedure. Perhaps computers can model those as well, but I would say we’ll see limited benefit from artificial intelligence in terms of psychology. It’s also a tool. Artificial intelligence can do things that real human intelligence would not be able to do. Computers can combine vast amounts of information and sort through it, finding patterns in a way that would be almost impossible for a single human mind to do, so they can make life better in lots of ways. But they’re a tool for us. As a psychological tool, it can teach us some things about the human mind but not everything.
Many young people at the threshold of their careers are looking for advice on what direction to take. What would you tell them?
It’s unfortunate you’re asking me this now because for many years I mentored a great many young people and gave them lots of advice. Around 40 people got their research careers started by working with me. Today, I’m not as confident about the future of the field and I don’t know what the right thing is. I don’t even know what field I would go into if I were starting out with the benefit of my own wisdom.
One good bit of advice is while you’re in graduate school to take all the statistics you can, because in the long run that limits the questions you can ask and answer. I tell my students I had my last statistics course in 1976. And nobody takes statistics courses after you’re a professor. So I get things to review where they’ve got statistical analyses with some methods that weren’t even invented when I took my last class. You want to get as much on top of things as you can because you want that statistical knowledge to sustain you for the decades to come.
Then, I advise them to practice writing skills, to get to where you write every day. Writing hard for everyone at first, but it gets easier as you continue to do it, and the automatization process works so that your writing gets better.
Let’s say you’ve got to learn multiple methods, lab procedures and statistical approaches, that work for you while you are still in graduate school, so that when you get a job as a professor, you can just capitalize on those things. The first few years while you earn tenure you need to produce, so that’s not a time to be exploring new methods. You explore new methods when you’re earning a Ph.D., and then after you get tenure, you can explore new methods and try other things—that’s what tenure’s for. But to earn tenure you have to play the game by the rules, the way other people do it, and you have to have something already that works for you that you can reliably produce interesting results on. I would tell them all those things: Learn how research is done and do that, prove yourself first, then you are entitled to go off on your own and tackle grander things.
Quite practical. Would you encourage young people to choose to swim upstream against the dominant tendencies of the time?
Perhaps not entirely. I think you want to keep that in mind and maybe do a little of that. But remember, you have to earn tenure based on the methods and standards that prevail at the time. So when you start out you have to do something that will get you published and earn the approval of the decision makers. Once you’ve done that, then by all means also do some swimming upstream and question established ways of doing things. But by doing everything the opposite of what everyone else is doing, you’ll probably just get frustrated and you won’t get funded. It’ll be difficult to get tenure and you’ll end up dropping out. Establish your career first. Once you have tenure, you can do whatever you want, that’s its purpose, so people can challenge existing ideas. But to get there you have to prove yourself by what the field thinks is important and the right way to do things, and I think that’s not a bad model at all.
Surprise question if you don’t mind.
Sure.
I have a list of 30 questions that my readers would like to ask the most influential psychologists in the world. Please draw one.
Give me number one.
Have you ever cheated as a scientist?
No. The question surprises me, because it seems to assume that if you asked someone like Stapel, who cheated extensively, he would say yes. I imagine that fraudsters (and my view is there are probably very few of these among today’s scientists) would deny cheating, thus giving the same response as honest people. I think Stapel’s case is revealing, because he started cheating early and then did it frequently. Once a scientist is established, there is far more to lose than gain by cheating, so even if someone lacked moral scruples, he or she would still not take the risk of engaging in any sort of fraud.
To be sure, norms change. I recently spoke with one of my mentors, now in his 70s, and he remarked that what is now despised and condemned as p-hacking was once considered best practice. That is, if your study did not yield significant results, it was reasonable to try various other analyses, such as using a covariate to get rid of some of the error variance. This might nudge a finding across the .05 significance level. Today, that might be considered cheating. Back in the 1970s, when I was being trained, we were all taught to do that. I think most of us have changed to go along with the new norms (I certainly have), but if you apply today’s norms to judge older work from the 1960s and 1970s, you might say that almost everyone cheated back then. I don’t agree with that view, judging past work by today’s standards, but others may disagree.
Personally, I had a pretty strict upbringing, so truth, honesty and loyalty are strong feelings for me. For others, I can understand cheating when you’re starting out, because you just want to get something published. But by the time you’ve gotten tenure, you’ve published a bunch of real work and anything dishonest would cast all your work into doubt. I was talking to another professor here yesterday. We work with many people, and we discussed what if one of them cheated, what if one of them faked data. We can’t check all their work and you have to trust the people you work with. The conversation was stimulated by a case in another laboratory, in which someone who trusted someone else who then did something wrong and it was bad for everyone. You live in fear of that happening. I’ve got around 660 publications, and to think if someone came into my lab and faked data and it were found out and I didn’t notice it, I believe it that would cast doubt on all those 660 publications. It’s an ongoing fear of scientists that someone in a lab might do this.
As science becomes more and more collaborative, we rely more on other people to tell the truth, and then one person can do an enormous amount of damage. Again, going back to Stapel—he not only ruined his own life, but many other people’s lives because they had published with him. Students and proteges found even their honest work came under suspicion and was tainted. Imagine, some of them are just about to come up for tenure and suddenly half the papers that they put out are under suspicion. They did things honestly, but just by virtue of being associated with Stapel it was all under question, and they couldn’t use it as a credential. There’s a whole lot more that could be said about this.