When You Beat People at Poker, Are You Winning Because You Read Their Language Better, Because You've Studied PCSycho Linguistics?

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When playing poker, you're really just trying to build a model of your opponent. In order to pick the tell up, you have to be staring at the human being. Human beings in general don't like to be stared at. But if you stare at somebody too long, they'll be uncomfortable. So when people are bluffing, they're uncomfortable. And so when you're seeing these these physical tells from them, what you're seeing as signs of discomfort....

For Annie Duke, the poker table is a perfect laboratory to study human decision-making — including her own. “It really exposes you to the way that you’re thinking,” she says, “how hard it is to avoid decision traps, even when you’re perfectly well aware that those decision traps exist. And how easy it is for like your mind to slip into those traps.” She’s spent a lot of time studying human cognition at the poker table and off it — her best-known academic article is about psycholinguistics and her forthcoming book is titled How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices.

Annie joined Tyler to explore how payoffs aren’t always monetary, the benefits and costs of probabilistic thinking, the “magical thinking” behind why people buy fire insurance but usually don’t get prenups, the psychology behind betting on shark migrations, how her most famous linguistics paper took on Steven Pinker, how public policy would change if only the top 500 poker players voted, why she wasn’t surprised to lose Celebrity Apprentice to Joan Rivers, whether Trump has a tell, the number one trait of top poker players, and more.

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Recorded June 24th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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