Stick Vs Carrot
Incentives and punishments are opposite ends of the same spectrum. In their opposing ways, both attempt to steer people towards a prescribed set of goals and behaviours. But which is most effective in getting people to behave better? Or is a society of universally well-behaved individuals simply a utopian fantasy?
In this week’s episode, we discuss the carrot and stick approach. We unpack the carrot and stick metaphor, discuss the concept of zero tolerance, toilet passes in schools, Plutarch, dictatorships, corporal punishment and data on punishments.
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph, and this week we're discussing zero tolerance. Chris, something that's often on my mind, and I'm sure the nation and our listeners is, what is happening in Lincolnshire? Chris, what's happening in Lincolnshire?
Speaker B:Well, there's an example, a particularly sort of pointed example of schools enforcing very or zero tolerance policies on discipline. So King Edward VI Academy in Spilsby in Lincolnshire has been in the national news because of their sort of fairly draconian policies on various issues of discipline. But this is sort of more broadly symptomatic of a trend in schools at the moment for particularly new academies in perhaps tougher areas to really introduce very, very stringent discipline measures. So for example, in this school, a girl was suspended for going to the toilet without permission, and a child was also reprimanded for her shoes being too shiny. So not unshiny, but just not the right amount of shininess. I call total bullshit on that. That didn't happen. I dare say that's an exaggeration. A lot of this is based on the complaints of the children. Sorry, the complaints of the adults. But there is definitely something going on with schools and I've heard lots of stories locally, because my daughter's just started secondary school, of children having their pencil cases inspected to check they've got the right set square and all that kind of stuff. And the punitive measures, punishments are handed out for these things not being 100% correct. So yeah, there's a trend of zero tolerance policies in schools. So it's a thing. Why are we interested in this? Well, it's got me started thinking about the idea of rules, imposition of punishment, and whether zero tolerance is actually an effective way of getting people to conform or meet the requirements in a school. Does it facilitate the better delivery of education? Yeah, so that was it really. It was a question of do harsh rules
Speaker A:work? Okay, Nick, lift us off. How do we want to frame this? Well, I suppose it's the universal
Speaker C:question of how do you get people who include children, children and people too, how do you get them to behave better? Now, if we knew the answer to that, you might think we would be living in some kind of utopia. But it might be that actually the dystopian aspects of modern life are attempts to cope with or solve the problem of bad behaviour in some respect. But first of all, I've got some questions about this school. My son is also at a school which is pretty strict, but it doesn't sound particularly worse than the school I went to, for example. I was always getting in trouble, mainly for being cheeky. So from a user perspective, I'm not a fan of strict rules. But as a parent, I am. Because my instinct is, well, you've got to fix behaviour or you can't get anything else done, right? So it feels like if you're a school, if the kids are behaving badly, forget about how you're teaching them, they're not going to be listening, they're going to be fighting each other, sticking compasses in each other's legs and so on and so forth. So it feels like a universal problem. This is merely an example. I do want to know more about the girl who was suspended for going to the toilet without permission, because why didn't she just ask for permission? She had a medical toilet pass. What is that? It's a big thing in secondary schools,
Speaker A:having this sort of thing. A toilet pass? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the idea is, because people, kids all the time are going, I need to go to the loo, please. And the teacher says, no, you can't. And you can't just let them go willy nilly. And so a lot of schools, yeah, because schools instituted this toilet pass system. However, this sort of runs into various issues, which is some people have medical conditions, which means that, you know, they do need to go
Speaker C: d sticks was only recorded in: Speaker A:Right. Look, I'm, I'm worried. I'm concerned about feeling a bit panicky. Because I think so far, the way we've framed this, and what we've said so far, we spent 10 minutes talking. And all we've said is, what's the better way to motivate people punishment or encouragement, right? And, hey, maybe the answer is, it depends on the context depends on the individual, if it's an individual we were talking about. And the answer could be anywhere between punishment is better, or encouragement is better, or hey, guess what, a little bit of both is better. And by the way, let me delight you by saying, it depends what your intentions are. What do you want your outcome to be? One, and two, how do we measure it? Right? How do you measure that? Yes, bad behaviour in
Speaker C:schools, by the way, there just isn't really any data about that. Right. For example, so that's, I mean, you can look at crime. Yeah. But how do you separate other factors out? I don't know. Yeah. But the problem with, with, you know, the kind of law we have in Britain is it's entirely punishment based. It'd be interesting to ask the question of to do some experiments where people got rewarded for being good, but that doesn't really happen. We merely punish people for being bad. So just to put that out there, there is a big data problem here. So we're going to be relying on sort of anecdotes and studies and academic, little academic studies. But I think, yeah, I think that we need to, we probably, we do need to think a bit more about what actually we mean by, you know, by sort of a punishment. What is it? Yeah. Chris? Well, I was also going to say,
Speaker B:I think there's also another element going on with this type of zero tolerance policy, which is about the attempt to psychologically break down the people you want to be compliant. So it's not just about saying, if you do this, this thing will happen. And then you make some rational judgment about, okay, well, you know, the risk to me is this. So I'll probably avoid doing that, you know, because I don't gain that much by doing the behaviour. There's, that's part of punishment. But I think particularly in this case, there's an element of, of a sort of an attempt to almost destroy the resilience of the individuals so that they are compliant holistically. So you sort of fight hard on, it's like the idea of, you know, military discipline and the drill sergeant of you, you break the individuals down so that they then will just do what you tell them. So it's not on an individual by individual basis. It's holistically, can we sort of break these people down? Almost also a little bit like cults and new religious movements and the idea of, you know, brainwashing, indoctrination. If you control that environment sufficiently, and you build up that dependence on, on following rules in, you know, just universally, will you make those individuals generally compliant? And I think that's, whether that's a valid approach or not, whether it works or not, whether it's okay to do that or not. I think there is a drive, you talked a little bit about, well, these people, they come from environments, you know, some of these children come from environments where they don't have lots of rules. And the school is the place where you've got to go, you've almost got to really concentrate the rules. And, you know, so I think that's also an aspect as well as just, on this case, how do you get them to stop smoking in the toilets or whatever?
Speaker A:Well, let's try and frame this with a couple of examples. And so a similar one, if you ever look at, you know, films and series about army training, right, is famously the army, I would say, for the most part, goes with a sort of a stick approach, okay. And it is, as you say, Chris, that sort of collectively, let's reset everyone just to get everyone to the same sort of place in terms of what's acceptable. And I suspect the army policy would be, look, stick works, we've been doing it for a long while. But once you've kind of reset it a little bit, you do start offering a little bit of encouragement. So that's sort of one context.
Speaker B:And I think just very briefly on that, that's the stereotype that's still in everybody's consciousness. But I think that has shifted, you know, in the UK, we had the deep cut barracks sort of investigation of, you know, kind of hazing, harsh military training and the impact on people. So I think even in that environment now, it's much more touchy-feely. Much more sort of supportive than one might expect.
Speaker C:Yeah, I mean, there's definitely, it's definitely the case that blaming people and punishing people is not cool anymore. Right? Which might be, I think, partly what's driving people's reaction to things like this school. There is this kind of idea that we should be praising people for the things they do and not for the people they are. That's another one of the sort of recent ideas. So you should say to someone, oh, you made a really good effort. Not, oh, you're very clever. Or you're very talented and so on. So there, I mean, these things come and go, don't they? Trends in what in kind of, you know, which you think would be driven by evidence. And in some cases, it seems like they are. But yeah, I mean, it feels to me like the stick approach has become very uncool recently. And I suspect things like this school and my son's school and so on are probably, to some extent, a backlash against what people see as education having gone totally soft
Speaker A:over the last sort of 20 or 30 years. Whilst you're thinking, just to give another example, something I know as a sports lover yourself, Nick, especially football, is it's a bit of a sort of hackneyed phrase you hear often on a match of the day and so on when they're talking about management styles. And they say, oh, the thing about this manager, he's a great man manager because he knows when to, you know, when to sort of, which players you need to sort of lay down the law a bit and that will sort of spur them on and which players you need to put your
Speaker B:arm around them. Well, and also the idea of the hairdryer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody just shouting in your face at half time. Yeah. Yeah. Got results. Most successful British football
Speaker A:manager of all time. A very shouty man. Very shouty. Brian Clough. No, nice. Ron Atkinson. No. You're sort of close with Ron Atkinson. It's Alex Ferguson. Never heard of him.
Speaker C:Yeah. Keep going. Basically, this is about social manipulation. I think we are. I'm about to start talking about economics. Not really. I'm going to use economic language to frame the question, which is about. So you're presumably people are behaving badly because they perceive a benefit to them from doing so. If your shoes, I don't want to talk about the shoes being too shiny because it doesn't make any sense to me at all. But, you know, take going to the toilet, you know, presumably when people go to the toilet to bunk off, that's because they they're a bit fed up and they want a break or something. There's some benefit to them. And the idea is that, you know, as long as you can make their chance of being caught times whatever punishment they receive outweigh that benefit, then they just will stop doing it. Right. That's that's the theory, obviously. Or alternatively, to put your thumb on the other end of the scale, that you're giving them a reward for not going to the toilet in some way, which, again, is is enough to offset whatever benefit they get from doing it. That's the theory that really underpins everything right here. And that's the that's what underpins everything in, you know, about the way the kind of sentences we give to different criminals. And so on. The idea is that, you know, we're trying to gauge it so that the so that the amount of punishment offsets the, you know, offsets the benefit of doing the crime. That's that's the gist of it. Chris has described this school as zero tolerance. I don't I don't think we talked about what that means. My understanding of zero tolerance is that you the the phrase the origin of the phrase is from the whole kind of the the the idea that you don't give someone a kind of warning and you don't let them off a few times and you don't kind of inculcate some idea of immunity in them. You go straight for the punishment on turn one. But but I mean, I don't think it's terribly well defined. Is it the idea of I mean, what does it mean? And is it true that this school is doing zero tolerance? Yeah, I think I think you're
Speaker B:right. I think it's that that sense of you apply, you apply the rule, you apply quite harsh rules immediately without consideration of context as well, that it's just a university applied, it's viewed, you know, and what one of the things I was just going to going to briefly mention is the phrase, draconian, obviously, based on the, the Athenian leader, or lawgiver, Draco or Dracon. And some of the rules that now it's not actually clear, again, it could be one of these a historical case of slightly, you know, false news to some extent, because there's not a great historical record about what the draconian laws were. But Plutarch says about shoes mustn't be too shiny, your shoes must be too shiny. But I think they're a great example of, of the idea of zero tolerance. And this is what Plutarch says about them. He says, death was the punishment for almost every offence, so that even men convicted of idleness were executed. And those who stole pot herbs and fruits suffered just like sacrilegious robbers or murderers. So this idea of a sort of one size fits all, brutalistic, immediately applied without, you know, consideration of nuance.
Speaker A:I mean, the benefit of that is it's simple to understand, right? The downside is it'd be a what if there's a misjudgment? What if there's a, you know?
Speaker C:Yeah. Yeah, but forget about that. Because yes, you're right. You're right. You know, you've got to worry about what happens if it goes wrong. That's that is something to think about. But do you think if we had the death penalty for, you know, parking on a double yellow line, do you think more people would do it or fewer? I would imagine fewer would do it. Fewer would do it. So it works, right? I mean, I think the point is, what we've said that this whole idea of it cannot but work, punishment and reward cannot but work, right? And so the question is, how do we design it so that it's optimal? Now, if we really wanted to have, you know, completely to have like, let's say the best behaviour, however that's defined, what it is you're trying to do to kids to, you know, get them to behave or grownups with the law. You know, if we just had the harshest, you get suspended for having shoes that are too shiny, or whatever the harshest punishment is that a school can can give. I don't know. Suspension doesn't seem that harsh to me, especially if you don't want to be at school in the first place. But anyway, the point is that if you go back to... Corporal punishment, says Nick. Yeah. Well, well, I'll talk about that in a minute. There's some interesting data on that. But the so I mean, why don't we just do that? Why don't we just have zero, like proper zero tolerance where anytime you step out of line, you're at? So what are the arguments against? Because I feel like the burden of proof is on the people who don't think we should be doing that to say why we shouldn't be. Because that is if you want good behaviour, then go nuclear on bad behaviour. Why don't we do that?
Speaker A:Yeah, exactly. So it depends what you want your outcomes to be, right? Because let's say you think that the top priority, maybe the only priority is that you have fantastic discipline in your schools. Yeah. And you could sort of have, you know, execution if you for the similar to you were saying with the parking for whatever offence, being late, being scruffy, not turning home, working on time, you name it execution, right? You would have fantastic discipline. Yeah. In your class. You're absolutely right. That's an outcome. If that's your desired outcome. Brilliant. However, you would also have some other things like nervous wrecks, suicides, and automatons producing etc, etc.
Speaker C:But why do we think that having zero tolerance on bad behaviour is the same as clamping down on creativity? Because people always- Well, let's just hold on.
Speaker A:You don't have to turn- Because of the risk, let's say. So let's say one punishment is execution, as we've said, if your homework is not to standard. Okay? And let's say you come up with a, for your art homework-
Speaker C:It has to be in your power to do the thing that you're, you know, there's no point in punishing people for doing things they can't control. So it's got to be, otherwise it won't have any-
Speaker A:This is where I think it's difficult to define. So let's say in your art, in your artwork, you make some sort of satirical art piece that's criticising the school discipline record of executing people. Okay? That would probably be frowned upon, and you might get executed for it. So therefore, let me finish, let me finish, let me finish, let me finish, let me finish. Okay, so let's say the rules do say that. So therefore, no, if the rules say you are not allowed to insult the school, okay, then you can see why that would be a stop on creativity.
Speaker C:You're disagreeing with the rule. You're disagreeing with the rule here. You're saying we shouldn't have a rule where you're not allowed to criticise the school. Fine, I agree with that. But you're not talking about, what we're talking about here is how you enforce that.
Speaker B:Oh yeah, so I think there is a link in the sense that there are two things around the rules which relate to the punishment. So if the punishment is absolute and extreme, you get rid of the child out of the school, or you execute somebody, or whatever it might be. It's something irreversible. If the rule subsequently, so the school set the rules, and not everybody might agree with those rules, right? So they're the rules of the school, but you might have a sense of like, well, are these the right rules? So there might be some debate about the right rules. Subsequently, you might change some of those rules. So I don't know, take the rules on homosexuality, right? So let's say they'd executed people for that, and then a year later, it's no longer a crime. That becomes problematic. So if you have zero tolerance and the punishments are extreme, it's much more difficult to alter and manipulate the rules because you've severely censured people.
Speaker A:You've given less manoeuvre for flexibility.
Speaker B:For accepting that you might have messed up the rules in the first place. You might have come up with the wrong rules.
Speaker A:And just to support you for a moment, Nick, actually, I think what's interesting is if you take two examples, because if we think of traditionally quite strict environments, if we take two, let's say the British public school system, which basically means private schools, and how they traditionally were, we take that as an example, but also dictatorships. Let's take Brazil as an example, which had a dictatorship. Actually, those really strict rules can really foster creativity because you're forced to be that extra little bit creative. It's good for them, really. It's good, really. But what happens, and I've seen this a lot, so you do end up with British public schools, very damaged individuals who are emotionally, what's the word I'm looking for? Stunted. Stunted. But you also get people like Monty Python, right? You get British satire because you're forced into that sort of avenue. Similar in Brazil, where during that period, in the 60s and 70s in particular, you get sort of really creative musical movements, which are a response to that sort of harsh dictatorship and those rules. So I don't know what my point is, other than that it's weird. In one sense, it stifles creativity and...
Speaker C:No, I think you're muddling up. Yeah, go on. I think I probably... How do we enforce stuff and what we're enforcing? You could have a liberal democracy. You could take Britain now, you could say, right, freedom of speech, no laws about what you're allowed to do sexually. You can do anything you like as long as it doesn't harm other people. But if you deliberately tread on someone's toe, you get shot, right? It's a very liberal kind of country. The only real thing you can't do is harm other people. But the punishments are super harsh. There's no contradiction there at all, right? So the question is why we don't do that. What you're saying is, the problem is if you're a dictatorship, you're doing two... Dictators mainly are there to try and keep themselves in power. That's their main concern, right, is to stay in power. So a lot of the laws, what you are and aren't allowed to do, are geared around not being able to complain about or take steps to remove the dictator. Well, they're probably bad. Should they be the law? No. That's nothing to do with how the laws are enforced. What we're saying is that laws which are designed to support a cult of personality are bad. Well, I agree with that. What we haven't done is work out why it's wrong to... Okay, so if a school, if you hand your homework in late, you get suspended, zero
Speaker B:tolerance in some sense. Why is that bad? Well, and I think what I'm saying is take the treading on toes example. If you execute people for treading on toes and then you decide that's not the right thing to do, you've executed a bunch of people for something that you've subsequently decided isn't the right thing to do. Also, because the risk is so great, it might drive extreme and unintended consequences like nobody goes outside because they're so terrified of treading on one another's toes. So even though the risk of doing the thing might be quite... I might accidentally
Speaker C:tread on someone's toe. Yeah, so you're talking about... Okay, so that's one reason is the risk of wrongly convicting someone. The risk of wrongly convicting someone is much higher if the punishment is higher, whether it's death or not. Just by definition, if you're applying a bigger punishment, then you're imposing a bigger risk because the cost is greater.
Speaker B:Yeah, but also there is a chance of any crime that you might commit it without intent, right? That you might accidentally commit the crime, which I suppose is similar to being wrongly convicted of it. But if the rule were about treading on toes, whatever the circumstances...
Speaker C:Again, I think then what you're saying is that that shouldn't be the law. The law should be that we
Speaker B:shouldn't intentionally tread on people's toes. Right, but what I'm saying is the law setters, there's a fallibility there in setting the laws. And if you therefore really extremely police the laws, then there's no room for that fallibility because you're getting rid of all the people who commit crimes against those laws that you subsequently might rescind.
Speaker A:Listen, I'm slightly lost as to where we are, but listen, nonetheless...
Speaker C:I've got some evidence about what works.
Speaker A:Great. Once you've done that, we do need to kind of sum up whatever it is. And then I've got a question or two. I don't think we've got anywhere.
Speaker C:I don't think we have got anywhere. But nonetheless, I think it's surprisingly tricky, actually. Well, I mean, I think it just reflects the fact that we don't really have any real insight into what works. And also, one thing we haven't discussed is nothing might work. There are some people whose behaviour can't be changed.
Speaker A:Because we've not talked about individuals, really, right? Because actually, in what we've talked about before in terms of happiness, people are generally on a scale of one to ten. I think it's the same with obedience, let's say, adherence to rules, which is different individuals are sensitive, you know, on a different scale. But Chris, you're never going to get him to do... Actually, Chris is quite difficult. I think you bust up against rules and so on. He's a naughty man. He is a naughty man. Chris is about to say something, isn't he?
Speaker B:Yeah, no, I was just going to say that idea of individual variants in terms of rule following, you know, there is sort of evidence around that. There's a study done at the University of Ulm by neuroscientists where they were sort of taking MRI scans of individuals involved in a sort of study, an exercise, thought experiment, which was about splitting the money between... So it was about looking at social norm compliance and do people adhere to social norms with and without punishment as being a sort of factor in their decision making. So the experiment looked at the subject being asked to split money with another individual. And so they were given this sum of money and they had to decide how much of it to share or whether to share it all. And when there was the risk of a punishment in there, they found if you didn't share, if you didn't follow the social norm, they found that people shared more. So, you know, that's to Nick's point that actually punishments do drive social compliance. But there was large individual variants. So some people shared regardless. Some people shared not at all, where there was no risk of punishment and much more so when there was risk of punishment. And they equated this to the sort of characteristic they framed Machiavellianism, but essentially sort of selfishness and opportunism. But they were also scanning the brain at the time. They realised there were two different areas in play of the brain. The orbitofrontal cortex was very active when people were considering the threat aspect of the calculation. And the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was very active when people were thinking about the greed and the sharing element and particularly the suppression of the greed, the greed urge. And they found that the area used for considering threat was much more active in the Machiavellian individual. So somebody who is more self-interested, is the suggestion from the study, is more concerned about whether punishment is present or not than somebody else who is operating than the person who shares it. You know, in either circumstance, which makes instinctive sense. But what it suggests is that perhaps punishment, you need punishment for some people, but you don't for others, or it has a greater effect on some people.
Speaker A:Yeah, there we go. Also feels like we're getting into a little bit of game theory there or prisoner's dilemma or something. I don't know, but I wish I'd been missing that for a while. Nick, so you said you've got some evidence, would you say?
Speaker C:Briefly to cover off why this is so hard to pull out from evidence is, I mean, first of all, lack of data, like you don't really, we don't have data on punishment interactions in schools. We don't have data on, you know, who gets rewarded or praised or really how their behaviour changes. You have to do studies into that. You can't just look at the data. There are selection effects in a lot of environment, like people generally choose environments which suit them, right? So you might go, you know, the army, they're quite authoritarian and lo and behold, the people in the army are kind of tend to be more authoritarian. But that's because people with those kinds of personalities are more likely to join a rigid, sort of more structured environment. You have the problem of separating cause from effect. So, you know, you've got, you will find, for example, that people who are punished more harshly in school are more likely to misbehave as adults. But of course, that's because they were misbehaving as children and more likely to get punished. So it's very hard to see what seems to affect what and how much is just, you know, inherent and how much is actually, you know, you don't have a counterfactual. That said, what can we infer from things? Well, I think we've touched on this, but it is true that harsher punishments reduce crime, right? So in general and all other things being equal. And if you look at, you know, sort of percentage of criminals convicted, severity of punishment, you link that to, you know, the crime rates, you get quite a good model. You know, you look at the UK, the peak of crime in the UK was sort of the mid 90s. And that is when the government started imposing tougher sentences. There's, I have to say, that's not uncontroversial. There's lots of people who disagree with that and actually think it's more, there's other trends going on, which explain it better. But by and large, you know, it's pretty uncontroversial that all things being equal, harsher punishments equal less crime. And one would assume it's the same on a micro level in schools. However, types of punishment, and I think we've touched on this as well, but there is quite a lot of evidence that corporal punishment is bad. It is more likely to make someone aggressive, more is linked to delinquency, it's linked to domestic violence. And they've, they've, you know, they've tried to do studies where they separate, they try to separate this from the problem that violent people are more likely to get, get caught, given corporal punishment. So, for example, if kids are, watch someone getting physically punished, they're more likely to be aggressive in the way that they play with each other and so on. So it seems to promote aggression and violence, corporal punishment. So it's probably a good thing we don't do that anymore in most countries. And it's been declining over the last 50 years everywhere in the world. There's a famous story, I'll mention this because it's important to bear this in mind, but Kahneman and Svirsky have this story. It's not actually really attested. I don't think there's, this exists as a study, but that there is, and this really raises another methodological problem, that when you're praising and blaming people and seeing what effects it has on behaviour, they use the example of pilot training and whether they made a good landing or a bad landing, and whether they were praised or blamed. And it seemed that after they were given praise, they were worse. And after they were given blame, criticised, then they were better. But they say, well, the problem is there, you've got regression to the mean. So if someone does a really good landing and gets praised, they're simply statistically more likely to not do as good a landing next time. And similarly, someone who does a very bad landing is more likely to do a good, purely statistically, purely randomly. Yeah. So if I praised you every time you rolled a six on the die, and then I criticised you every time you rolled a one, it would look like every time I praised you, the dice roll numbers got lower, right? That's all they're saying. So this whole issue about how people, there seems to be some evidence of gender differences. So females are more likely to attribute, when they're criticised, they're more likely to attribute it to a lack of ability, rather than a lack of effort. So they're more negatively influenced by, you know, praise and blame, if it looks, if it appears to imply that they have reduced autonomy, whereas that didn't seem to be in effect with boys. But yeah, I mean, on a micro level, I don't think we're any further forward. I don't think we know what packages of interventions really work. There is a ton more opinion than there is data. So I think the jury's out. I think we just have to keep trying things out.
Speaker A:Well, look, it's great. We've all got more than one kid. Yeah. So we can just do in our own houses, do an experiment.
Speaker C:Well, mine are now going to separate secondary schools. I don't even have any anecdotal evidence. I mean, my first secondary school was quite, you know, traditional boys private school. You know, a lot more emphasis on kind of discipline, I suppose. My sixth form was really let it all hang out. And, you know, was very liberal, didn't really have much interest in how you were behaving around the place. And yet everyone still more or less behave themselves. It wasn't like people were being naughty in sixth form. I don't know. It's a whole bunch of things, different demographics, you know, different ages.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think it's surprisingly complex. And I think we've asked a lot of questions without necessarily sort of getting all the answers we want. But that's exactly as it should be. Right. I think. Right. Yeah. We've run out of time. We're gonna have to draw it to a close. And so thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. Thanks for listening. We've been here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph. Until next time. Goodbye.
