Why Do We Make Excuses?

MAUGHAN: I’m having an allergic reaction to this right now.

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DUCKWORTH: I’m Angela Duckworth.

MAUGHAN: I’m Mike Maughan.

DUCKWORTH + MAUGHAN: And you’re listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show: when should you make excuses?

DUCKWORTH: “Like, I, I tried to start the car, but it turns out that, like, you know, my sister-in-law had borrowed it, so it wasn’t even there!”

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DUCKWORTH: Mike, we have a question from a Ken Reid from Texas, and it is about excuses. You ready?

MAUGHAN: I’m not ready, but it’s not my fault.

DUCKWORTH: Exactly. All right, Ken Reid says, “Mom always said, ‘Don’t make excuses.’ But I want to know, are excuses effective? For example, if you make a mistake at work, is your boss more likely to look down on you for giving an excuse/explanation? Or is she more likely to be understanding and forgiving if you make an excuse? Are you better off if you suck it up and silently accept responsibility or if you explain the cause of/reason for the mistake?” Such an interesting question. Do you have answers for Ken?

MAUGHAN: I have so many thoughts. But my first thought, Angela, is about a hilarious Reddit thread that I was reading recently about funny excuses that people have made.

DUCKWORTH: There’s, like, a Reddit thread on, like, great excuses?

MAUGHAN: Exact — I mean, sometimes you go down the wormhole, you know, and you just start reading. Okay. So, one is about a substitute teacher for kindergarten who just didn’t show up to teach a class. And so, this person writes, “The person actually never called, but when we finally got a hold of her, she said she didn’t show up because she woke up early and decided to bake bread, so she couldn’t come to work because she had to wait until the bread was finished. She said she could work in the afternoon instead because she really needed the money.” And they said, “Yeah, that’s not how it works when you’re a substitute kindergarten teacher.”

DUCKWORTH: I feel like those are the people who should be the most reliable. You are there because the actual kindergarten teacher cannot come, and there will be five-year-olds and six-year-olds in a room, by themselves, if you don’t show up.  

MAUGHAN: Pure pandemonium. This other one is actually — is actually my favorite. So, this person writes in, “I used to work with this person who was notoriously ditzy and just a bit strange. Anyway, we started work at nine a.m. And she never turned up. She finally rang at 11am to say she had just been daydreaming and was aimlessly following the car in front of her and had driven over a hundred miles away.”

DUCKWORTH: Wait, she was daydreaming lost track of, I guess, like, where she was and just, like, kept going?

MAUGHAN: Just on the way to work and just mindlessly followed this car in front of her for, like, two hours.

DUCKWORTH: I have to say, the reason why there is a hole in this argument, as a psychologist, is that when people are daydreaming and they go on autopilot, they tend to do what is habitual, and people do not tend to follow the car in front of them.

MAUGHAN: For two hours! 

DUCKWORTH: I would believe, like, “Oh my gosh, I always turn left at this intersection, because I always turn left there and oh my gosh, I just turned left automatically and I just, I didn’t think.” But, yeah, I smell a rat.

MAUGHAN: Well, because you know the old saying — I shouldn’t say “you know the old saying.” You never know these old sayings.

DUCKWORTH: I never know the old or the new sayings.

MAUGHAN: I’m going to use the more appropriate version, but they say, “Excuses are like armpits. Everybody has them, and they all stink.”

DUCKWORTH: I have not heard that old chestnut, Mike. I like it. And I think this is, um, revealing, because I think the very mention of “excuse” — you know, when you talk about a kid making an excuse for not having their homework or, like, somebody not showing up for work — it’s automatically negative. It’s automatically this suggestion that the person’s explanation is distancing themselves from responsibility and that that’s not good. But when psychologists think about excuses, I don’t think they think about it in quite those loaded terms, because the definition is more narrowly shifting the causal explanation for this negative outcome — you know, homework wasn’t done, somebody didn’t show up —  away from something that the person could have done themselves. It’s a little bit like, “It wasn’t my fault, because of these other factors that were really beyond my control at that time.” And if you just narrowly define things as that’s what an excuse is — it’s something that distances you from personal responsibility for some negative outcome — it’s not by itself necessarily a bad thing. Psychologists have also studied something which is not the same as an excuse, which is a “justification.” And I think these are two kinds of explanations. So, something bad happened — like, wow, these, you know, five-year-olds were in this classroom by themselves, or like, this assignment didn’t get done, or you were supposed to show up and you didn’t show up —

MAUGHAN: I’m still mad at someone.

DUCKWORTH: What? For not showing up.

MAUGHAN: This is in high school. I’m not really still mad at them, but I’m still confused. We planned to meet at this place and I went and waited for hours for my friend. And in all the years since, we’ve even talked about how he didn’t show up at all and how I waited for hours. I never got an excuse or an apology, and I would have appreciated anything.

DUCKWORTH: Wait, you’ve stayed friends with this person and you’ve talked about it and you never got an explanation? Okay. So, look. When you just don’t understand something — oh my gosh, Mike, I can’t sleep if there is a question that I don’t have the answer to. So, I think there is this kind of, like, open parentheses when we have a question like, “Why didn’t he show up? I just don’t get it. I don’t understand.” I think that’s one reason why we do seek explanations. Like, we’re always looking for cognitive closure. And let’s just say that after a really unambiguously negative outcome, big or small, this kind of explanation that’s an excuse can be differentiated from a justification. In the academic literature, the distinction is that an excuse is an explanation in which the person denies full responsibility: it’s not my fault because of, you know, mitigating circumstances that were really beyond my control. The kind of canonical example that’s often given is there is a soldier who admits to have killed other people, which is an immoral act, but the excuse is that the soldier was following orders. But a justification is different. There, the decision maker does accept responsibility, but you deny that this was, in fact, an immoral or inappropriate act because you point to some higher-level principle, sometimes called a superordinate goal. You’re like, “Yeah, I know this was wrong, but the overall reason was right and therefore it justifies this.” So, the example, going back to the soldier who admits to having killed other people, instead of saying, like, “Look, what else could I do? My commanding officer practically had a gun to my own head.” Here, the soldier would say, “Yeah, but this is the cause of freedom, right? {MM^Right.] Like, if I hadn’t done what I had done, you know, we wouldn’t have served this bigger and more important cause.” I will say that — I’m thinking about this meta-analysis where the scientists tried to kind of review all of the evidence up to 2003 on whether, when a company, for example, you know, does a layoff — you know, there’s a negative outcome, at least from the employee’s perspective — and the explanation can be not offered at all, of course, or it could be offered in the form of an excuse, right? “There are mitigating circumstances, the economy is contracting, we have no choice,” to, like, justification, like, “This is actually for the best.” The finding of this meta-analysis is, first of all, any explanation is better than no explanation. So, having nothing to say, like, leaving people with that cognitive dissonance that you had — like, why didn’t you show up? Like, what just happened? That’s bad.

MAUGHAN: At least tell me your car broke down, or lie to me.  

DUCKWORTH: Give me some closure! Either an excuse or justification is better, it seems, than, like, nothing. And then if you run a horse race between excuses and justifications — just in this management context, like we’re talking about companies, for example — then explanations that are excuses turn out to be more beneficial than justifications. So, when you offer an explanation where the oomph of the explanation is like, “I really couldn’t have done otherwise. There were factors that were beyond my control.” Like, “You know what? I was going to meet you, Mike. I was so going to meet you. Like, I, I tried to start the car, but it turns out that, like, you know, my sister-in-law had borrowed it, so it wasn’t even there!” So, those excuses are different from, like, justifications. Like, “I know I didn’t meet you, and I could have met you, but I decided not to meet you because there was a superordinate goal.” Like, there was another thing that I should have done even more than do this.

MAUGHAN: So, I can see why it’s better for the excuse giver. It allows me as the excuse giver to say not “I am bad” because I didn’t show up, but the situation made it so. But I also guess I would rather hear that they couldn’t make it because someone took the car than that they wanted to work out and had a superordinate goal of being healthy, and they preferred that to showing up to talk to me. So, it’s better for both parties.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know about, like, “better” in an objective sense, but when you hear somebody make an excuse — and I guess there has to be some version of believing it. Like, if it’s not a credible excuse, then that’s a whole other kettle of fish. But basically, like, yeah, I mean, I think the thing about an excuse that’s, like, plausible — like, mitigating circumstances beyond my control —  I think in a one-time situation, like, yeah, I guess I would feel better as the listener. I think I would feel better about you as a person. But I think the justification thing is just like, “Oh, wait, now I have to really think.” Like, do I agree that you made the right choice in choosing some higher-level goal that I may or may not think is a higher-level goal? So, I think excuses continue — I mean, maybe that’s why they’re Reddit threads because they do work, at least in certain contexts. I think the reason why we all scold ourselves and others about making excuses is that — partly because they do work. So, we know that there’s, like, an easy way out. But I will certainly say that if somebody is constantly excuse-making, like, it’s always something, you know, I will start to wonder.

MAUGHAN: Right. We want to be understanding, kind individuals who recognize that life happens and situations arise. But generally speaking, I don’t think we want to work with people who are making habitual excuses. 

DUCKWORTH: Right. And how do we live a life where we’re not taking that easy way out? Because you can make up another excuse and make up another excuse, and this does get to character. You know, I ran Character Lab for some time, this nonprofit that was designed to use psychological science to help kids thrive. But you know, the very idea of character, some would argue is almost the 180-degree opposite of excuse-making. Whereas there may be some short-term upsides, when you think about what character is — like, you know, having integrity, having a sense of responsibility — that you can’t live a life like that if you’re constantly dwelling on the things that were not your fault. You know, there’s so many things in life that are not a one-shot thing.  Like, every time I go to the boardwalk, which I don’t usually do, so, so by the way, is this term a South Jersey thing? Like, is “boardwalk” a commonly accepted term, or is this only for people who grew up, you know, “near the shore” as we say?

MAUGHAN: I think it’s near a shore.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, okay, so other places have boardwalks? 

MAUGHAN: Yes, so Southern California, love to go walk along the boardwalk. You know the old song, “Down by the boardwalk. Down by the sea”

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, but then I wondered whether that was just, like, Atlantic City in New Jersey or — which it may have been. 

MAUGHAN: That was only referring to Jersey? 

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, Jersey. Yeah. “The shore,” as we call it. Right? But when I do go to the boardwalk, “down the shore,” almost to a one, the restaurants are terrible. Like, they’re god awful. And it could be, like, people want to eat terrible, god-awful food when they’re at the beach, or —

MAUGHAN: Or you don’t have to have good food because you have good atmosphere.

DUCKWORTH: Or, it’s because you have a one-time customer. You’re not really going to come back, at least for another year, maybe ever. So, the idea of character is not to be thinking about, like, anything as a one-shot thing. It’s trying to think of yourself as somebody who is showing up again and again in a similar situation. Like, it’s actually a trick that people use for self-control. So, if you’re going to order out, like, say you’re going to, like, DoorDash dinner. And you’re, like, scrolling through, and there are options that are, like, really unhealthy but delicious and options that are maybe a little less delicious, but healthier, right? Like, you’re wondering whether you should get the chopped-chicken salad or, like, a cheeseburger with fries, for example. The tip that some self-control scientists would say to use is that when you are on DoorDash, you shouldn’t think of this as a one-time DoorDash delivery. If you think of it as just tonight, then you’re like, “Oh, well, you know, cheeseburger and fries, just tonight, whatever.”

MAUGHAN: Right, I can make an exception just this one time.

DUCKWORTH: And then tomorrow, that’s when I’m going to eat healthier. So, the pro tip, like, the way of reframing this choice in a way that will get you to make the healthier option, is to imagine that this choice is the choice that you’re going to make this night and every night for the rest of your life. This is trying to choose a pattern of choices as opposed to a one-time choice. And I do think with excuse-making, there is a parallel here, which is that if you can imagine showing up again, and again, and again to meeting, after meeting after meeting, and always having a different excuse, or always having an excuse, like, that’s not the kind of person we want to work with, right? So, when you balance these, like, short-term gains with these long-term consequences you really want to focus on the long-term, repeated nature of life. You are not a pizza shop on a boardwalk.

MAUGHAN: Right. And I think what’s really interesting in today’s world is that I don’t know how many one-time interactions we have. I remember I was working on this one negotiation and someone said to me, “Well, why are you spending so much time? Do you care so much? You’re never going to negotiate with this individual again.” And my response was: the world is so small and digitally and in other ways, so connected, I have a reputation and so many people will know how this goes — if you’re continually the type of person making excuses, there’s not going to be a meeting to go to anymore if you do that too many times.

DUCKWORTH: Mike, I think you and I would love to hear the thoughts of NSQ listeners about making excuses. We’re asking you to record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and to email us at NSQ@freakonomics.com. Maybe we’ll play it on a future episode of the show. Also, if you like us and want to support us there is just no excuse for not telling your friends about No Stupid Questions. You can also spread the word on social media or leave a review in your favorite podcast app. 

Still to come on No Stupid Questions:  Angela argues that some excuses can make the world a better place.

DUCKWORTH: We could use excuse-making to take more responsibility.

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Now, back to Mike and Angela’s conversation about excuse-making.

DUCKWORTH: I knew right off the bat when we got this question that you would be in the “no excuses” camp. Like, I knew Mike Maughan would not be pro excuse-making. And I think, indeed, we are not pro excuse-making in general, you know, because of reputation, because of character, because of, you know, everything that we’ve learned. But I do want to make an argument for the upside of excuses for a moment because I think it’s revealing and actually maybe more useful than we think. So, let me take you back a ways to the 1980s. There was this, like, actually very influential paper written by two psychologists, Rick Snyder and Raymond Higgins. They were both at University of Kansas. And the title of the paper is provocative. It’s, “Excuses,” colon, “Their Effective Role in the Negotiation of Reality.” So, what Snyder and Higgins want to argue is that when something bad happens and now we have to make this, like, post-hoc explanation, if you are in the “no-excuse sequence,” what you do is you internalize the cause to yourself. That’s what it means not to make excuses. You’re like, “What could I have done? How am I responsible?” That maximizes self-focus. And then, what happens, they say is that your self-esteem can go down, that you can feel negative emotions of various kinds, and that can actually lead to sort of an overall diminished image of yourself and even a lack of control. Like, you feel less control, maybe over the next thing that’s going to happen. Now, I’m not saying this is right or wrong, but I want to contrast that with what they consider the “excuse sequence.” This is you going down the path where the negative thing happens, you have to make an explanation for it. Here, you think of external things: you know, the road blockages, the computer rebooted, the “I was sent the wrong document,” the “whatever it is.”

MAUGHAN: Right. I’m having an allergic reaction to this right now, but I’m still listening.

DUCKWORTH: I know I’m going to force you to be in the excuse sequence, right? I know you want to be in the no-excuses sequence. But what they would argue is that now you’re not focusing on yourself. You’re not thinking about Mike Maughan. You’re focusing on these external factors, the task. That focus will preserve your self-esteem, you won’t suffer these negative emotions like anxiety or guilt, your performance may be better because you have maintained some kind of positive image or sense of control. That’s the crux of their argument. And when they make this argument, I think they really are focusing on how, you know, at least in the short term and at least for the excuse giver, you end up being a — a more agentic person when you make excuses. I am sure this is going to work against every fiber in your being, so I have to ask you, Mike, if you’re still breathing. What is your reaction to this very academic argument?

MAUGHAN: I’m still breathing. My immediate reaction is yes/and. Of course, you know, no one wants to send someone down this horrible spiral where it becomes a, “I am bad” versus “this thing happened.” And I wonder if there’s a world where my excuse, the circumstance, whatever is: there was construction, or I hit every single red light, or, you know, there was X detour, and that’s why I’m late. And I can say, “I ought to have planned better, understood the route and figured this out.

DUCKWORTH: You want to keep, like, at least two causes in mind at once. Like, you can think of multiple explanations for what happened. And at least one of those things you might want to take responsibility for, and at least one of those things you might want to distance yourself from, responsibility-wise.

MAUGHAN: Right. And maybe I’m just trying to have my cake and eat it too, but I’m trying to think as a boss and as someone that’s responsible to other people, I think it’s important to recognize that life happens. I mean, things come up. I’ve been late to meetings literally because of traffic. it’s, I think I, for me, much more palatable to hear, and maybe I think much more palatable to express, “Hey, my fault. I should have left earlier or looked at what the traffic patterns were like. There was a huge accident. I’m really sorry that I’m late. I’ll do better next time.” Like, that sequence makes sense to me and is something that feels palatable to me in terms of working with others or asking people to work with me. I accept responsibility and give context. Again, maybe I’m just trying to have it all and that’s not how it works.

DUCKWORTH: Okay, I’m going to give you a test now. 

MAUGHAN: Okay, I love tests.

DUCKWORTH: I’m going to read you a statement and I need you, without overthinking it and without being like, “Well, Angela, let’s talk about it.” I’ll read you what it says. You’re going to write down —or tell me — what you think. 

MAUGHAN: Quick response.

DUCKWORTH: “Imagine that you’re giving an important talk in front of a group of people, and imagine that the audience reacts negatively.” Tell me one major cause of what happened.

MAUGHAN: My immediate reaction was that I told a story that people didn’t resonate with or that they reacted negatively to.

DUCKWORTH: Okay. Now, I have three questions for you about this cause: you told a story. It hit the wrong note entirely. First question is: Is the cause of the audience’s negative reaction due to something about you or something about other people or circumstances?

MAUGHAN: Me.

DUCKWORTH: In the future — this is your second question — in the future when you have talks will this cause again be present?

MAUGHAN: No.

DUCKWORTH: And then, finally, is the cause something that just influences giving talks, or does it also influence other areas of your life? 

MAUGHAN: It influences other areas of my life. 

DUCKWORTH: Okay, so you said that it was very personal, like it was due to you; that it was not permanent, because it won’t be present necessarily again in future talks; and then finally you said it is pervasive — like, it does influence all areas of your life.

MAUGHAN: My thought was if I told a story that didn’t connect with the audience, then I had not carefully enough understood the audience to whom I was speaking. And I’m not going to make that mistake again. The reason I said other areas is, is maybe in other areas of my life, not just giving a talk, it’s indicative of I need to understand who I’m with and be more understanding of the perspectives of others in the way I was trying to communicate them — whether that’s a meeting, a conversation with a friend, dinner with a family member. I always have to understand the perspective of others.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, so if you gave a bad talk, you would probably be like, “Oh, what happened?” And then, you would want to really know whether this was diagnostic of something that wasn’t just that one talk. It may not even be, like, giving talks, but just in general, am I tone deaf? Okay, so I’m going to tell you what you just took. I didn’t make up this measure, but I think it’s ingenious. So, my advisor, Marty Seligman, as you know was maybe the most influential person in this science of helplessness. You know, a term that he coined was “learned helplessness.” He wanted to understand the roots of depression. And he came to the thesis that we can learn that we’re helpless. And what that means is that if you experience a lot of failure or a lot of adversity, a lot of things going wrong, and then wrong again, and then wrong again, you can come to the conclusion that there’s nothing you can do to make tomorrow a better day. And when he came up with this questionnaire, he called it the Attributional Style Questionnaire, or A.S.Q. for short. It has a number of scenarios. And when you answer these questions, what he’s trying to get at is your kind of reflexive, spontaneous, attribution style. Like, when you come up with explanations, where does your mind go? And then, those three questions that I asked you are his way of trying to understand the way you explain things, especially bad things. And the three dimensions are: personal, permanent, and pervasive. So the personal one is, is this you, Mike? Or is this about other people or circumstances outside of you? And you chose to say you. That’s, I think, at the heart of excuse-making, right? You did not make excuses. But the other two dimensions were permanent and pervasive, and it was interesting to me to hear that you did not think it was permanent. You thought you could change in the future, but you did think it was pervasive. So, you were like, “This may not have just been one talk. I may be doing this everywhere.”

MAUGHAN: Yeah, I think you have to ask that question. Like, where else can I learn from this and apply the lesson so I can improve every aspect of my life? 

DUCKWORTH: So, you got, like, two Ps out of three: it is personal, it’s not permanent, and it is pervasive. When Marty made up this questionnaire, I believe he found that it was characteristic of people with clinical depression to have all three Ps. You know, something goes wrong, like you give a talk and it goes horribly, and immediately a depressed person is like, “Oh, God, it’s all my fault. It’s always going to be this way. And it’s not just this talk. It’s pretty much every human interaction I have.” And he saw this pattern over and over again. This just puts you in a very dark place. And you feel completely helpless and, by the way, responsible. But what I loved about your answer is that, you know, as the decades have passed and Marty has continued to think about helplessness and its opposite, agency, I think he has — and certainly I have come to believe that the recipe for living a good life is not rejecting all of these Ps. It’s probably the most important thing to reject what you rejected, which is that it’s permanent. You did the thing that we would really want everyone to do. Regardless of whether it’s my fault or not my fault, and even regardless of whether this is pervasive or just local, the real key to agency is to believe in the possibility of change. So, you rejected that this is permanent. You rejected the most important P of the three P’s. And I think that’s where I am now today. Like, I actually love people who take things and they say, “What could I have done differently? How am I responsible? Oh, but wait, I’m going to hold on to hope. Like, I’m going to hold on to the possibility that this isn’t permanent.” So, I love your profile. Like, your responses are, in my view, in a way, like, optimal.

MAUGHAN: I do think it’s interesting: you have been talking about the upside to excuses, I’m sure that there are some instances where it’s just: a comedian leaves and, you know the old phrase, “Tough crowd tonight.” Maybe they had an off night, maybe it was a tough crowd, but I also get, and I’m opening myself up to this idea, that even though you’ve just described my output there as optimal potentially, that maybe it’s okay to say that it was a tough crowd. And the pervasive piece, I think is interesting too, because if we extrapolate too deeply, I can see how we cross the threshold into self-flagellation almost, where it’s like, “Oh, everything I do is wrong.” And I can see where that is potentially harmful versus recognizing that episodically things happen that are bad and we don’t have to take it so far. So, I’m willing to come closer to this idea that maybe there are times when excuses are okay. And weirdly it’s Marty’s three Ps that helped me get there.

DUCKWORTH: Mike, as we close out this conversation on excuses — Ken, we have given your question much consideration. I don’t know that we’ve come up with a simple “yes, no” answer. We’ve talked about how, in the long run, excuse-making may not be so great for reputation or character, but maybe in the short run, there could be some psychological benefits. But as we close out, I want to tell you a story that is, I think, revealing about how we could use excuse-making to take more responsibility.

MAUGHAN: Really?

DUCKWORTH: And it goes back to mask wearing and the pandemic. When the pandemic fell over the, the world, behavioral scientists like me were being called up by places like the CDC. And we were all being asked, what can we do to help people wear a mask, get vaccinated? These were fundamental questions of behavior change. So, one of the scientists that pitched in was Bob Cialdini. And when he was asked, how do you get somebody not only to adopt a behavior, but to change a behavior where they have to change their personal position? You know, imagine vaccines. How do you take somebody who has said, “No, I don’t want to get it? No, I don’t want to get it. No, I don’t want to get it.” What could make that person wake up one day and say, “Yeah, today I want to get it.” It’s really an interesting question. And the framing that Bob Cialdini suggested, which I think is just genius, was a kind of excuse-making. He said, “You know, you could send people more information. about vaccines and their efficacy. You could also send people more information about how few side effects there are. You could highlight the public health consequences. You could talk about their neighbors and how important it is that you protect their health.” But he said, “The suggestion that I have is to use very specific language: I couldn’t have known.” He said, “You have to, like, basically give people some language for changing their minds. I couldn’t have known. Now I know, but I couldn’t have known before.” So you’re giving them an excuse for not getting vaccinated and then not getting vaccinated and then not getting vaccinated. You have to frame this as: that was legitimate. There was nothing you could have done. But now things are different. And I think that was genius because there are occasions in which you make an excuse for yourself in a way that paradoxically liberates you to take responsibility for the next day.

MAUGHAN: I think that’s a fascinating way to look at it. And of course it excuses almost our own bad behavior to allow us to change.  And sometimes we need an excuse to change and become better.

Coming up after the break: a fact-check of today’s episode and stories from our NSQ listeners.

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And now, here’s a fact-check of today’s conversation:

Angela says that her Ph.D. advisor Martin E.P. Seligman coined the term “learned helplessness.” We should note that he did so in conjunction with his longtime collaborator, psychologist and neuroscientist Steven F. Maier.

Angela also describes the results of a 2003 meta-analysis that found that excuses work better than justifications. As she emphasized, that research focused on interactions between employees and employers. Researchers studying excuses in other domains have come to the opposite conclusion. For example, a 2022 paper found that people were mollified when public agencies offered justifications for service failures, whereas excuses often made the situation worse.

Mike misquotes Kenny Young and Arthur Resnick’s song about romance on the beach, as recorded in 1964 by the American vocal group The Drifters. The line is “under the boardwalk / down by the sea” — not, as Mike mistakenly sings, “down by the boardwalk.” The song has been covered by artists including Bette Midler, the Rolling Stones, Northern Irish punk band The Undertones, and the actor Bruce Willis.

Also, while today the term “boardwalk” is used to describe a stretch of restaurants, recreational facilities, and seaside attractions near any beach, the term originated in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The first boardwalk was designed in 1870 by railroad conductor Alexander Boardman as a means of preventing tourists from tracking sand indoors. In 2011, National Geographic ranked the Atlantic City boardwalk the best boardwalk in the nation — in spite of the lack of gourmet dining.

That’s it for the fact-check.

Before we wrap today’s show, let’s hear some thoughts about last week’s episode on doing the right things for the wrong reasons.

Robyn PARNELL: Hi, Angela and Mike. The dilemma discussed in NSQ 215, “Doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reason,” is a false one, a vestige of the contamination of contemporary ethics by first-century religions, as in the: “When you give alms, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,” admonitions. I don’t care if Andrew Carnegie’s motivation for philanthropy was so that people would think better of him, or if he were trying to atone for being a robber baron. His ego, his problem. The public got libraries. That’s a great thing. Let’s say I volunteer to make sandwiches for a homeless encampment, and afterward I make certain that friends and family know the great thing I did. Now, did my less than selfless motivation make the sandwiches vaporize? Did my bragging about my good deed change the nutritional content of the sandwich? Of course not! No matter my motivation, the sandwiches are real, and some hungry people had a meal they might not have had before.

Ian IRWIN: Hi, Mike and Angela. This is Ian in Portland, Oregon. I wanted to talk about the dangers of doing the right thing for the right reasons. I’m currently an emergency-department nurse, and I’ve also been in the Marine Corps. I worked as an EMT, and I’ve done some teaching as well. And these are all professions where  you’re doing the right thing for the right reasons, and as a result you’re often taken advantage of. We saw this with the pandemic where we can call nurses “heroes” but doesn’t necessarily translate into the wages or the equipment necessary for those professions. And same thing with teachers and for members of the armed forces as well. Oftentimes, this is because, well, they’re doing it for the passion, they love their patients, they love the students, and so, well, we don’t have to pay them as much, or give them the resources that they need because they are so committed that they will go out and spend their own money. So, I just wanted to throw that out there — that even doing the right thing for the right reasons, um, has unexpected consequences. 

That was, respectively, Robyn Parnell and Ian Irwin. Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us. And remember, we’d love to hear your thoughts on excuse-making. Send a voice memo to NSQ@Freakonomics.com, and you might hear your voice on the show!

Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions: What happens when you put on a disguise?

DUCKWORTH: I would go around, “trick or treat,” and people would ask me, like, “what are you?” And without thinking too deeply, I was like, “I’m trash.”

That’s coming up on No Stupid Questions.

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No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lyric Bowditch is our production associate. This episode was mixed by Greg Rippin with help from Jeremy Johnston. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. You can follow us on Twitter @NSQ_Show. And you can watch video clips of Mike and Angela at the Freakonomics Radio Network’s YouTube Shorts channel, or on Freakonomics Radio’s TikTok page. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ@Freakonomics.com. To learn more, or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com/NSQ. Thanks for listening!

MAUGHAN: Kettle of fish, huh? You put your fish in kettles? 

DUCKWORTH: A kettle of fish. Look at that old chestnut.