Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an older episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This episode is part two of our series on the Seven Day Week, and it originally published on March five. Enjoy Welcome, Just about to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on the seven day Week. What is it? Where did it come from? What? What's it doing in our brains? All right now? When we cut off in the previous part of this series about the week, you were talking a bit about some sources you were reading about the history of the week, where the seven day week comes from. Because obviously, you know, one of the main things we talked about in the last episode is that other major blocks that we use for measuring times, such as the month, the year, and the day, are all based on facts about nature, usually about astronomy. You know, how the Earth moves, Earth moves around the Sun, or how the moon moves around the Earth, but the week has no such basis in physical reality. It's an artificial construction, with the possible exception that some people think there may be some underlying biological UH rhythms that contribute to it. One hypothesis that's been offered is the menstrual cycle or things like that, but it's hard to know for sure. So we know at least that the week is not based in astronomy. So where does it come from historically? Yeah, And in that we were getting into this idea of the market week. The time it takes for vegetables or fruit to UH to travel in from market UH, be sold in, mark it, and then for UH the individuals who brought it there to return then to the fields. Um. This would be just a basic market cycle, a market week. UH. And one of the sources that I was discussing here was um Avatar Zerubaville is the seven day circle. UM, So you know, point the author here points to the ten day market week of ancient Southern China, various other systems as well, because again there's nothing set in stone about it taking seven days to reach any given market anywhere in the world. It's going to vary obviously. Uh, so you have you have different systems that were in place, the ten day system. We also see the eight day system that emerged in what is now Italy. This is the Etruscan system. And so the Truscan system that that the name of that would come from the Etruscan culture, a culture that inhabited the Italian peninsula before the Roman period, right, and then the Romans would of course inherit the Intruscan system, and this eventually became the internudenum tempests, or the period between the ninth day affairs, which Zaruberville rights involves the Roman practice of inclusive counting, in which the last day of one cycle is the first day of the next. So this involves a market day held every eight days. Market and social life revolved around this market day, and schools and courts were closed for that day as well. It was also a day to set work aside to go to the baths um, and the cap limit for guests was raised as well, so you could have more people over on this market day. Now, the decline of the eight day week, the author rights, coincided with the expansion of Rome. It simply became too big for this system. To logistically work anymore. Um, and you know this comes down to the fact that a true urban economy ends up demanding continuous commerce. But this this was interesting as well. I'm gonna read a quote from the seven Day Circle here. Quote. Coincidentally, the astrological and Christians seven day weeks that had just been introduced into Rome were also becoming increasingly popular. There is evidence indicating that the Roman eight day week and those two seven day cycles were used simultaneously for some time. However, the coexistence of two weekly rhythms that were entirely out of phase with one another obviously could not be sustained for long. One of them clearly had to give way. As we all know, it was the eight day week that soon disappeared from the pages of history forever. Okay, so you're positing a time here where there exists such things as weeks, sort of like the weeks we imagined, but not everybody's using the same weeks at the same time, so they're just sort of like overlapping different systems that different people are using, which sounds incredibly chaotic and not especially useful. Yeah, yeah, because it's it's it's hard to exactly imagine what this would have been like, because we think the week is just set in stone, it's just this this grid work that arranges our lives. But too and and then I'm tempted to try and think of it, Well, maybe would be like using both uh, you know, pounds and uh and and and grahams or something, you know, having to to use two different systems of measurement. But it's not quite that either, because because there's still like, you know, there's still a certain length to um uh you know, to to some fencing or care at, etcetera. Um. But but when you're dealing with with time here and you're dealing with these market cycles, it it seems like you would just you know, would just be this confusing arrangement to have these two or more overlapping systems of different different amounts of time. Well, it's a big difference, is that. Say, if you're converting from standard to metric, there's a fixed conversion rate. It's not like how many pints go into a leader changes every day. But if you but if you have weeks of different numbers of days and everybody's not on the same one, you can't just line it up and say, oh, okay, this day in our cycle is the is this other day and somebody else's cycle. It would change every cycle because they're not the same numbers, right, Like imagine like thinking back on on like TV. Uh, just like TV programs and TV schedules like what you of NBC and CBS, um had not only like different schedules of what's coming out, but they had different calendars, like different days of the week, Like one did an eight day cycle and the other one day to seven day cycle. Like that would be that would be incredibly confusing, you know, trying to figure out like what what is on what day and what is opposite another show. It's it's it's just like again, it's it's it's interesting to try and imagine what this would have been like. But if I'm understanding zarubaval right in this quote, what he's saying is that, um, so you had this original sort of eight day cycle, the Etruscan system that was inherited by the Romans, but then you had these other systems of seven day weeks, the the astrological, the Roman astrological even day week, and the Christians seven day week, which I believe would be inherited at least in part from the from the Jewish Sabbath observance. Yeah. That that all this being said, it is important to realize that there is still a reality to a market week cycle. In many cases, you know, you have other four forces haven't changed what's happening with people actually bringing in crops and in the in the economic activities surrounding the sale of those crops. Um. Then even if you end up adopting, say a seven day week, you can still see these other market cycles uh, coexisting with it. And he points to some examples of this, points out that both Christian and Islamic use of the seven day week heavily influenced the continent of Africa. But you still see four day market cycles in parts of Africa, as well as eight and sixteen day weeks as well. So these e can amic rhythms in many cases still remain um or even if those economic rhythms shift like they're still not gonna necessarily, uh you know, conform completely to the seven day week cycle that has been superimposed on a region. Now, he he points to in uh, some other week cycles that are that are pretty interesting. He points, uh, for instance, to the nineteen day be High cycle of social and religious activity who was introduced in eighteen forty four by the Persian prophet uh Saeed Ali Mohammed, also known as Bob b a b Uh. It's generally spelled in English. UH. Nineteen is apparently a mystical number in the Behigh faith. And we see that in the use of a nineteen week year in the Behidh faith as well as a nineteen year va head um. And then three hundred sixty one years make a cooler shay. And that's because nineteen times nineteen equals three d sixty one uh. So UM, all that's interesting as well. Here's an entire stem that's based on nineteen four mystical purposes UH, spiritual purposes uh, similar to the the adoption of the seven within uh. You know, the the cycle that we we know and are immersed in. He also mentions that the Maya, on the other hand, used a twenty day um unital, which was the quote cornerstone of the entire Maya time measuring system. UH. The Mayan and the Aztecs solar calendars consisted of three hundred and sixty five days, made up essentially of eighteen twenty day weeks plus five blank days. UH. They also had a two hundred sixty day UH divination calendar year that was used exclusively for divination. There's also a ninth century Indonesian system that he mentions that they made use of both a five day market week. Six five and seven day weeks were used then to chronicle events, and the Indonesian system had several uses, but the main function, according to Zarubaville, was divination. UH. There were the right days to do various things, both inherently sacred things such as say, bearing the dead, and things that we might think of in you know, sort of modern life as being mundane things like moving or starting a new business, but of course, within the confines of a given culture, those things too may be considered highly sacred. So these are more examples of the what we talked about in the last episode, which is that you know it it depends on how you define a week to say where the week comes from. Because there's there's a history you can track of our current unbroken system of seven day cycles, but there also have been just lots of other things throughout the world throughout history that subdivided the month into some number of days. But it wasn't necessarily the same as our seven day week, right, And and I think it's interesting to think about how, on on one hand, you have very practical, very real world considerations and arranging these days into weeks uh and and saying well, I need to know what we're calling four days from today. I need to know what we're calling eight days from today so that I can plan things out. But then also getting into this divination area of well, is there something about the day after tomorrow that makes it more appropriate for me to do this act or this other act or to make a certain decision on that day. Um, And you kind of get into the sort of the roots of divination that we've discussed on the show before, where it becomes this kind of um system that you know, you may and it certainly entails supernatural ideas about seeing into the future and using imploying luck uh and uh and you know perhaps the uh you know, the good will of various deities. But it also is about like making uh, making space for decision and like helping decisions be made and and and in introducing randomness in some cases. Yeah. Actually got me wondering about the same thing, about whether a cycle of days in a week, whether that's seven days or whatever other number. Just having a named day within the cycle could aid in productivity and in spurring action, uh instead as opposed to say, defferring action forever, because if you live in a system where you don't have named days within a cycle. Again, I don't know this, I don't have direct evidence of it, but I wonder if that's sort of just um would allow you to have, well, you have right now and then maybe you have a concept like tomorrow, and then beyond that you've just got the future. And so like it does having a named day that's, you know, a predictable number of days ahead of now allow you to plan action in a way that you're more likely to follow through on an execute. Yeah, I mean it reminds me of some studies that I've I've seen about the importance of having deadlines just for productivity reasons. And I mean to a certain extent. I guess this varies depending on what one's you know, job is, what one's industry is. But the basic seven day week kind of has a built in deadline like Friday is, at least to a certain extent, always a deadline. Like it's assuming again that you have a job where you don't have to work on Saturday and Sunday, like that's the last day of the week. So in many cases you're trying to get something done, you're trying to reach like some level of finality, right, or at least it leans it's it allows you to lean into that interpretation anyway. Yeah, yeah, well it at least it gives you a principle on which to organize those those timelines. I mean again, I wonder like if we didn't have weeks and we just you know, just worked whenever, and you were like, how long is it gonna take me to do this? I mean, how how long do we We would usually say I don't know, one week, two weeks, and what would you say that I'm gonna say, thirteen days is how long it will take me. Yeah, there's something weird about like a thirteen day estimate on something, right, Why why not bump it up to fourteen days? Like it would seem equally wrong to give a fifteen day estimate on something like why is it taking two weeks in one day? Why can't it just take two weeks? That just seems like trolling. Yeah, well, maybe here is a good place to come back to some psychology research about the effects of the week, because in the previous episode I mentioned a psychology paper that looked into what it called mental representations of week days. This was by Ellis at All, and we talked about it in the context of the idea that while the week is broken into different types of days, weekends and week days, each day is also its own distinct concept, and this paper examined this in a number of ways. Overall, I'd say it's findings would be not very surprising to anybody who's ever been to school or had a full time job that was organized on regular bank hours. But it's good to have that information anyway, because a lot of times, you know, I often have this thought where like, you do a study and then the results come back and people say, like, that's obvious. Why do you need to do a study to know that. It's like, well, because if you if you just go by your assumptions all the time, you're actually going to turn out to be wrong a good bit, so it's worth checking. But it did find that, for example, people were most conscious of what day it was on Mondays and on Fridays, as measured by reaction times when asked to name the day, it found that people were most likely to feel like it was the wrong day. I feel like it was a different day than it was on days that were in the midweek, so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays. That's also not very surprising. Those are sort of the the middle days, the days that are you know, easy to get lost in the shuffle. It found that in terms of affective response, people really really like Fridays and really dislike Mondays, and the other days in between basically just kind of slope up and down between those extremes. And of course the standard note that these responses, as well as the ones in the um UH studies I'm about to mention here are are primarily, I think from industrialized societies in North America and Europe, where the seven day work week is highly salient. I have no way to prove it, but I strongly suspect that you would not find these same patterns at all if you were to exclusively survey populations that were less connected to this type of of economic work cycle, for example, rural farmers or hunter gatherers. But since then, I just wanted to talk about a bunch more studies. I was looking at about the days of the week and how we represent them in our brains, how we feel about them, and how they affect our behavior. Uh So, a couple that I looked at had to do with people's feelings about days of the week, following up on that, you know idea from the previous study that people like Fridays, they don't like Mondays. So one study I looked at was from twenty eleven published in Psychological Reports by Charles s Irany, Mitchell Burger, and Natalina as Latevska uh called factors affecting the extent of Monday Blues evidence from a meta analysis. This was a meta analysis that looked at a bunch of samples from previous studies that tracked both mood and days of the week and tried to see if there were correlations. And they said they did find evidence of a small but reliable quote Monday blues effect, so people had worse moods on Mondays, but the size of the effect varied greatly depending on what types of demographic groups featured in the sample. So for contrasts, they mentioned that samples focused on university students showed a large and consistent Monday Blues effect. College students really hated Mondays, whereas samples limited to a smaller, different cohort. The one they single out is married men who were not students showed a smaller effect. It was still there, but much smaller and with greater variation between the samples. Rob, does this track with your experience that you hated Mondays more when you were like a college student or younger in general? Yeah? Yeah, and it. I mean, it's it's easy to sort of fall on on sort of stereotypes when thinking about this. You know, you think of like the college student is is out partying all weekend and then open and they've got to go to class Monday morning, and uh and the married adult is maybe not partying all weekend. Um yeah, I um, I don't. I don't think I ever remembered necessarily just hating Mondays. But if I if I didn't like my job, then I was probably adverse to to going back on Monday to work there. I feel like nowadays, though, like Monday I really don't have a problem with in large part because I feel like I'm actually well rested on a Monday, whereas I'm i'm less' not that I'm i'm like losing a lot of sleep, but during the course of the week, I feel like I kind of steadily lose a little bit of sleep towards the end, so that Fridays I'm a little more worn out. Um, and then I catch up on my leap over the weekend and by Monday, I'm good to go. Yeah, that's something I think might be underappreciated, especially when it gets to a study will look at in a minute on on on behavior the the effects of cumulative fatigue over the course of week days. I think that that is a very good idea. But okay, So so that was that one study. Another one I looked at was by Stone, Schneider, and Harder, published in twenty twelve in the Journal of Positive Psychology. This one used a huge telephone survey with like hundreds of thousands of participants, tested for demographic variables and how people felt about different days of the week. They found, again unsurprisingly, a strong preference for weekends. People really really love Fridays. They like weekends. Uh. This study found weaker evidence that people really hate Mondays. Uh. It was it was a more reduced Monday blues effect, but they did find some variations. This one also found that day of the week effects on mood in general were more pronounced in younger p bowl generally, and the day of the week had less effect on mood for older people and especially retired people. So that might not be surprising because I think a lot of these day of the week effects probably have to do with when you have to go to work. UH. They found no differences on the basis of gender or on the basis of the presence of a romantic partner. Now, it does seem strange that there wouldn't be much emphasis put on Wednesday, though, because it seems like, like Wednesday is hump Day, right, Like Wednesday is the day where you may, uh, you know, feel the satisfaction of knowing that the the you're you're halfway there, You're you're more than halfway there. You are over the hump and headed in towards that Friday that you're looking forward to. You want scientific confirmation of hump day, hump day confirmed. It's like if hump Day is I mean this kind of we come into our assumptions, right, I have these assumptions about hump days. But if those assumptions are not borne out in UH, in the data then then maybe it's just like it's a silly notion. Anyway, Well, there may be some ways in which hump day is a alien effect, but it just kind of gets lost in the noise of this this big study with a bunch of other things going on. Maybe it doesn't show up, just fades into the noise when you're asking people, how do you feel about today, about this day of the week, or how do you feel today on the day that I'm asking you this as opposed to other more targeted questions that may pull out the hump day nous of hump day, maybe questions about like optimism about the future or something. Now you could ask another question. Again, we've been talking about, well what's obvious or what we would just assume, But here's another question. Seems like it has an obvious answer. Why do people seem to like weekends so much more than week days? I think I think both common intuition as well as some of the data we've looked at already would tell us it's because people like being off work. Uh. Though interestingly, of course, not everybody's work hours conformed to the standard Monday to Friday nine to five, and some people and some people also, you know, even if they do conform to that, really enjoy their work. But at least at the population level, this effect shows up strongly anyway. So I don't know if you know people who are restaurant servers whose busiest work is on the weekends or something like that, if they're just not enough of them to balance out the survey data, or maybe somehow even though it's their busy work times, they that they prefer weekends as well. I don't know. I I haven't found data on that. But this question of what causes people to enjoy weekends the most has also been analyzed in some psychology research, sometimes referred to as the weekend effect. And I was looking at a study from ten in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology by Ryan Bernstein and Brown called weekends work and well being psychological needs satisfactions in the day of the week effects on mood, vitality, and physical symptoms. UH. This held true for all different kinds of jobs, no matter you know what kind of work you had. In general, on average, people like weekends better than week days and uh, and not just like them better like that, they reported, say, fewer physical aches and pains on the weekends and reported feeling that this I thought this was really interesting. People reported that they generally felt more quote competent on weekends than week days. You might assume the opposite would be true, that people feel like, Okay, I'm competent in my job, so I'm competent on week days, but no, people felt competent on the weekends. Maybe that's just because I don't know, jobs are overwhelming, or because the nature of work is often such that it interferes with your ability to do your job as well as you could be doing it. But anyway, this study looked at different factors that could be influencing why people have such a strong preference for weekends, and the researchers concluded that the most important factors were probably two. One of them is the ability to spend quality time with friends and family with loved ones, and the other is the freedom to choose one's own activities. People like self determination in what activities they engage in. So you might imagine a scenario where somebody is off work for the weekend. They don't have to go to their job, but they don't get to spend quality time with loved ones, and their time is taken up with some kind of obligatory activity that they don't choose themselves, and in that case, it might not actually feel like a weekend at all. It might be just as bad as work or worse. I know, I have this experience. I can get really down about like a weekend that is just jammed up with unwanted obligatory activities. Yeah yeah, I mean, I know for my own part, there are things like, for instance, listening to music. I might I almost certainly listen to music more on my own during the work week, uh, just because I'm plugged in more or and in some cases are released in the past. You know, I've I've been commuting and so there will be more sort of designated media time during the commute, and then on the weekends you don't have that. So not not not that that necessarily pushes weekend good or bad, but it certainly gives it a slightly different flavor. There there are things that the weekend and not offer that the that the normal week days do. Yeah, yeah, totally. So, I don't know, the ability to determine one's own activities and the ability to spend quality time with loved ones whenever that happens. It seems like those are are major factors that increase people's feeling of well being along multiple axes. Um. But it just so happens that those things, on average happened the most on weekends for people. But you know, individual mileage may vary. But but while the previous results might be pretty obvious, you could also imagine that there could be other effects of the seven day week on human psychology and particularly on behavior. Now, again, these would be highly dependent on a person's economic and cultural surroundings, because, as we talked about in the last episode, basically all the evidence indicates that the seven day week is is not a fact of nature, but but a mental technology, something we have created. So it will depend on what kind of week you use and what the week is used for in the place where you live. A couple of random examples that have been observed over the years that I wanted to point out. So one is the question of does the stock market behave differently depending on what day of the week it is other factors being equal. Uh, this one doesn't seem totally clear. It looks to me like some studies looking into this have found a correlation. Others have have not or have argued that the correlations that have been found can be explained away. Um. But just as one example of of a study that did find a correlation and said it couldn't be explained away, there was Gibbons and Hess from the Journal of Business in ninety one. The article was titled Day of the Week effects and Asset Returns, and this found against prediction that expected returns for stocks and bills on Mondays were lower than for other days of the week, or perhaps sometimes even negative. And they were just like, we don't know how to explain this, We don't know of what factor would would explain this. Another example I found in a pay or by Ellis and Jenkins published in UH plus one in twelve. I know for many years I've been calling this journal p l O S one A lot of people say that way, but I just read an article saying that the pronunciation, of course that stands for Public Library of Science. But so it is an acronym. But but they say plas rhyming with floss. So from now on I'm gonna try to remember to floss like plas plas instead of p L O S. Yeah, but how about plos Sometimes it's kind of since we have like often a capital P lower case L O than capital S, it seems like that would be possos. I know now that I've said it, I'm gonna get it wrong in the future and looks stupid. Plus plus plus like floss okay, so plus one. Uh. The The article was titled weekday effects Attendance Rate for Medical Appointments large Scale Data Analysis and Implications. This study examined over four point five million hospital appointment records from Scotland between two thousand and eight in two thousand ten and it definitely found a trend. They found that the did not attend rate was quote highest for Mondays eleven percent and lowest for Friday's nine point seven and decreased monotonically over the week. So it went down over the week until it got to the lowest on Fridays. And in keeping with the trend, we've we've seen a few times here that there may be a day of week effects difference by age. The study found that the pattern was steeper for younger age groups than for older ones. Well you know it's it's one is tempted to fall back on stereotypes there as well and say well, maybe younger people are less concerned about about health matters versus older people. But that's those are generalities and I'm not sure if we can really lean too heavily on those. But why would that affect today of the week. I mean it would still it would mean that younger people are less concerned about health matters maybe on Mondays Tuesdays, and so they get more concerned as those on they've been partying all weekend. I guess I don't know, but I know that that even as a as an adult, um, I uh, there have been times where I reached Sunday and then I say, I look at the calendars, like, all right, what's coming up this week? What did I what did I you know, put in the books for the week ahead, And then I'll say, oh, I have a dental appointment on Monday, and I and there might be a temptation to want to rearrange that just because you know the nature of the Monday is that you know, maybe you're not maybe you're not excited about Monday, or maybe you are excited about actually getting some work done on on Monday, kicking the week off right, and it doesn't feel appropriate maybe to then spend an hour or more somewhere else, even if it is something important like a medical appointment. I know exactly what you're talking about. Man, When you know you're scheduling six months out at the dentist or something, and you're like, uh, yeah, Monday, that sounds good, and then it's that Sunday and you're like, oh, no, I can do this. Yeah, I should have put it on a Thursday. The two examples I was just talking about of possible weekly fluctuations in human behavior with the stock markets and with missed appointments missed medical appointments. Those were both mentioned in the background of a paper from which I want to talk about because I found it interesting and this paper experimentally explored a unifying concept that might explain a number of weekly changes in behavior patterns, and that explanation would be in risk tolerance. So this paper is by Jet G. Sanders and Rob Jenkins published in Plus one called Weekly Fluctuations and Risk Tolerance and Voting Behavior. And so the authors of this paper point out several observed trends in human behavior across days of the week, including the two I mentioned a minute ago, with stocks and and medical appointments. But they also point out things as serious as rates of attempted suicide. There are there are uh, you know, you can observe trends throughout the week in all kinds of human behaviors. But they argue that despite these observations, there has not yet been a unified psychological explanation for them. There's not one, uh explanation that people have been able to give yet it would say, here's why we're observing these trends. And in this paper, the author's hypothesized that one psychological factor which could influence a wide range of behaviors by fluctuating throughout the week is risk tolerance. Now, they did multiple studies to look at this, but the first one that was like a direct lab study I thought was interesting because it involved a computer game that is designed to measure risk tolerance, and this is called the BART test. BART is an acronym. It stands for Balloon Analog Risk Task And as with a lot of these psychological tools, is so the BART is really designed to try to reduce or eliminate the influence of other variables to get as close as possible to testing just the factor in question, in this case, risk tolerance and the test works like this. Okay, so rob you imagine you sit down at a computer and you've been told in advance that you're gonna play a computer game that will lead to a variable cash payout at the end. You're gonna get some money by playing this game, but the money depends on your performance, and so the game works like this. In the game, you have a series of twenty balloons that you get to inflate one at a time. So you start on the first balloon and you press a button I think space bar to inflate this cartoon balloon. And every time you press the button there is a money value contained in the balloon that goes up, so say it's increasing by a penny every time you hit the space bar, So you're hitting the space you're increasing your payout. But as you keep inflating the balloon, you get closer and closer to some randomized point where the balloon will pop. And if you reach that point in the balloon pops, you lose all the money you've earned so far, it all goes away. So what you're trying to do is inflated as much as you can without it popping, and then get and then you're going to do something called banking it, which means you say, Okay, I'm done with this balloon. I'm not going to inflate it anymore. I'll just take whatever money is in there now. Yeah, and there's similar I've seen some stills of what these, uh the simple games tend to look like. And they tend to be very simple because it's not about believing that you're looking at a balloon. It's about like the basic risk, like do do I risk it now? Do I risk it now? But you you find a similar mechanic in some games as well, where there'll be something on the line and do you keep pushing it, do you keep holding or do you go ahead and cash out? It's the basic double down principle. Yeah, and so I think, yeah, a game like this is a is a pretty good attempt to isolate risk tolerance as as its own variable like that, there's that's pretty much directly what it's testing. There's not a lot else that you could imagine is going into this. So every single moment of the game, you can either gamble by inflating the balloon more, potentially increasing your ultimate payout, but also risking losing everything. You've you've gotten on this balloon so far, or you can bank it and and keep that money start the next balloon. The obvious correlation is that people with a lower risk tolerance at the time they're playing the game will tend to bank balloons earlier and protect the gains they've already made, whereas people with a higher risk tolerance while they're playing the game will tend to keep inflating to make the payouts bigger, you know, with the increased risk of losing the whole pot. And of course, you know, risk tolerance is going to vary to some degree by by like fixed personality traits, like some people are just more risk tolerant than other people across the board. But then it's also going to vary moment to moment by but within a person. So a person might have a generally high, low, or average risk tolerance, but other factors I don't know. Maybe if you give somebody a few alcoholic beverages, their risk tolerance probably goes up. This is why casinos like to give people free drinks. And apparently the Bart test has has been shown to predict real world risk taking in domains like health and economics, so it seems like this is probably a pretty good test. People who take more risks in the game also take more risks in real life. So in this study they played this game with a number of controls in place to try to isolate day of the week as the only relevant difference. Now a caveat the sample size on the study was not huge. It was twenty five players across five sessions each, so a total of a hundred and twenty five barts um. So I wouldn't put too much confidence on this result until I see it confirmed in follow ups. But the study did find an effect, and it was an interesting one one that is not exactly what I would have predicted. Because, Rob, if you had to guess in terms of risk tolerance fluctuations during the week, what what would you guess the day that one would take the most risks, the most and the least. I would say most on Friday, least on my day. I would guess exactly the same thing. I would think that people are most risk tolerant on Friday and Saturday. Those are the YOLO days, that's canonical, and people would probably mean the most risk risk averse on Mondays. You know, that's like the hunker down and get through this day. But strangely, this is not exactly what the researchers found that. It's there's some partial overlap with what we just guessed. So, first of all, they did not test on weekends. We don't have data on Saturdays and Sundays. They were just testing variations between week days, and they found that risk tolerance people are willing to take the most risks to inflate the balloons the most on Fridays and Mondays. But then after Mondays, risk tolerance went down, and then it reached its lowest average on Thursdays. So that was a hum moment for me. I I don't know, like Thursdays, they're supposed to sort of blend in with the other midweek days. They're very similar to Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Why would people be the most call aucious, the most averse to taking risks on Thursdays? I mean, maybe it comes down to just sort of the finish line view of the calendar week, where it's like, all right, on Thursday, Uh, you know, I'm over the hump, I'm coming in towards the finish. I I need to actually get some stuff done today. I need to I don't need to take a bunch of risks. Uh. Tomorrow, maybe when the finish line is in sight, I'll feel risk here, But today is all business. That's just a guess. I don't know. I think there might be something to that. I mean, we can talk about a few options here, I guess. First, let's talk about what the authors themselves offer as as their preferred explanation. Um. So, for one thing, they hypothesize in their introduction that if risk tolerance varies throughout the week, it might be related to mood, since previous studies have found that mood has an influence on decision making. And I thought this part was also strange because the link between mood and risk tolerance is counterintuitive to me. But they cite multiple studies existing research showing that on average, people are more risk tolerance it will take more risks when experiencing certain negative moods, such as sadness. So apparently people experiencing sadness are more likely to inflate the balloon higher take more risks, whereas people experiencing happiness are more likely to be cautious and risk averse. This is another thing that's kind of the opposite of what I would have guessed from a gut feeling, though in looking at the research they cite, I guess it sort of makes sense maybe that, like feelings of sadness or despair can lead to a a what what do I have to lose? Kind of thinking? Right, right, And if you're optimistic, you're like, well, why should I be taking a risk Tomorrow's Friday? Yeah, I think this balloon, Yeah it's fine. So so that's kind of surprising already. But anyway, this fact would partially match the results they found in the balloon game, because okay, you assume people are generally in the worst mood on Monday. A lot of studies have found that, and then their mood gets gradually better throughout the week and then gets to its highest point on Friday. This would track with their finding that people take the most risks on Mondays and then get more and more cautious up to Thursday. Though then on Friday that correlation breaks because if the same pattern held, people should actually be the most cautious on Fridays of the lowest risk tolerance on Friday's because that's when they're in the best mood. But that's not what happens, Friday looks more kind of like the Yolo day that you and I would have guessed. It's it's on par with Mondays in terms of having high risk tolerance. So the authors explained this by saying, quote, the Friday recovery suggests that risk tolerance may track prospective mood more closely than it tracts current mood. On this account, risk tolerance is lowest on Thursday because that is when the most rewarding part of the week is imminent. When gain is expected, changes resisted risk aversion, When losses expect did, change is welcomed risk tolerance. And I don't know on this. I'm kind of halfway there on that explanation that that makes a certain kind of sense to me. But then again, isn't Friday already the highest mood because of prospective analysis? Like Friday itself is prospective happiness. People who work jobs with Monday to Friday schedules still have to go to work on Friday. But we love Friday's because we are thinking about the weekend being ahead of us. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and unless it creeps even further back in the week here, and like so basically you're, uh, your most optimistic on Thursday because it's about to be Friday. And then of course when it's actually Friday, maybe there are some realizations that, well, you know, Friday is just another day and it's it's nothing magical about it. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know. I think this is curious. I would say if more people test the same thing, if the same pattern the authors found here holds up in other studies, I would wonder if it's indicative of a multi variable input, Like maybe improving mood explains decreasing risk tolerance throughout the week, but then when Friday comes, some other psychological influence takes over. I don't know what that would be, but it's sort of overwhelms the effective mood on risk tolerance. But but yeah, I I don't know. Yeah, I mean it's sometimes it's it's hard for humans to live in the moment. Like a I think about like the ramp up to Halloween. You spend all of October moving towards Halloween and getting into the Halloween spirit and all. Sometimes I've found that when it's actually Halloween, it's still a lot of fun, but there's also the the the you know, the sadness that Halloween is about to be over. That that that there's going to be the sharp cut off, and now it's November, and now all these other factors are in play. I know exactly what you're talking about there. With two October files here, I feel like I get the most pleasure in like the first two weeks of October because then it's like there's so much October still ahead of us. Yeah. But and then again, I don't know if this really this can really relate to the week by week experience, but yeah, I don't know. Now. Another interesting thing that goes along with his I was reading a short article by one of the authors of this study, uh Rob Jenkins, and he also said that the same pattern was born out in analyzes of historical chess games. That they they had done an analysis of big archives of chess games and try to quantify risky moves within those games and then correlate that with what day of the week the games took place on, and they found they say, they found the same thing that uh moves got uh more and more cautious on the on the trend from Monday to Thursday, so you know, riskier moves on Monday and then Thursday, very conservative playing and then Friday suddenly risky moves again. So that was not a part of this paper. That was just something i'd read the author talking about. But within this same paper, the authors also looked at how days of the week correlated with the voting preferences as expressed in opinion polls on a couple of big issues in UM in UK politics in recent years Scottish independence and bregsit And from the moment, I think I'm not going to focus on that because I feel like those kinds of issues have they're so noisy with real world data and so full of variables that are hard to control for uh. And of course the authors are aware of this, they make note of it, but I feel like that that may be harder to fix on day of the week effects and and things like risk aversion, because especially when you're looking at something like a big contentious political issue, like a huge part of political rhetoric is specifically aimed at manipulating how people frame political and voting choices in terms of risks. So it's hard to pick one side of a political issue and say, well, this is the one that's the more risk averse option, and the other one is the one that's more risk tolerant, because there may be lots of cases where voters on opposite sides of an issue in roughly equal proportions both believe their side to be the less risky one. Yeah, it's going to debend on on what sort of media you're consuming. One side is going to frame this is the obviously the risky choice, and the other side is going to say, no, this is the this is the risk adverse choice. Though they point out something interesting that does rely on a couple of conditionals. So if if they're finding is indeed true, if it is borne out that people's risk tolerance on average fluctuates throughout the week, and if it's true that there are consistent patterns that show up in populations, such as Thursday being consistently the most cautious day, the most risk averse day, then what day you hold elections or referenda on could actually affect the outcome, which I think is interesting. But another thing I was thinking about in the light of these assessments of risk aversion is coming back to your idea of the effect of week days being an effect of CUMU a live fatigue. I mean, I wonder how that would play into risk tolerance as expressed throughout the week. Does like, Okay, could it be that being progressively more tired as you go through the week and getting to Thursday, you've you've most likely had the most nights in a row where you didn't get as much sleep as you wanted, where you were trying to pack things in and get through the days that came before. Could that somehow express itself in terms of what kind of risks you're willing to take by Thursday? And then maybe some kind of mood effect takes over on Friday that overwhelms that fatigue, right, And then likewise, if if, if you're more prone to lose sleep over the weekend, would you have have this sort of scenario playing out, you know, moving into Monday where yeah, you didn't you didn't get a lot of sleep last night and the night before, uh, and here you are catching up. Another question I have is I wonder about interactions between between risk aversion as expressed over different days of the week and our feeling of freedom about what we get to do on on each day of the week. So, like, how is your risk aversion affected by it being a day where that is full of tasks that are not really up to you you just have to do them, versus on a day where you can do whatever you want. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I can imagine a scenario in which, yeah, you haven't really had much in the way of choice, So now I have the choice to take a risk. Well, maybe I'm gonna take it. I don't know. It kind of comes back to the where we're talking about, though, is that there seems like there's a fair amount of noise in any of these considerations, and and so much just room for subjective interpretation. You know, it's just gonna vary so much depending on what an individual's life structure happens to be. Right, So if the pattern holds up, I do think that's really interesting with this Thursday thing, But I'm not convinced of any particular explanation yet. Yeah, but this does just make me want to, like, I don't know, do Bart tests on myself all, you know, all the time figure out what's what's going on in my brain. I guess it's hard to. I don't know. I guess knowing what I'm testing for would affects the outcome, so I can't really do that. But I want to bart myself. Well, there's gotta be a good pin and paper kind of BART scenario you can use. Well, I'd still know that I was taking the test, and I couldn't, like, you know, do it blinded. But yeah, in any case, I do hope that risk tolerance researchers use bart as a verb. But the way we have been doing I barted. I barted twenty five participants today. You know, I haven't had a chance to really research this, but it looks like there there are a few um balloon analog risk task tests BART tests that you can find online. Uh, though I will warn you that the one I clicked on it had some really loud sound effects. I don't know that we really need alloud air hissing sound effect every time I pump up the money balloon, So it only works if it's deafening pops, pops and pumps. Okay, I think maybe we've got a called this episode here and then come back later this week. That's right, we'll have more to discuss about the seven day week. We'll get into some more and probably some expected territory concerning more historical data, will probably get into some unexpected areas. As well concerning the seven day week period. Obviously, we'd love to hear from everyone. In the meantime, we've already been hearing from a number of people about these episodes, so keep it coming. Will remind you that our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind published on two season Thursdays. Monday, we do listener mail Wednesday as a short form artifact episode, and on Friday that's our time to do Weird How Cinema, where we set aside most serious concerns and just focus on a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. 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