Here's a question that anyone who's spent enough time around professionals eventually runs into. Daniel puts it this way. We've all heard "do as I say, not as I do." How many of us have known doctors who do the exact opposite of every health recommendation they talk about? People working in technology who think the whole thing is a bunch of crap. Dentists who chug soda like it's going out of style. He says the reflexive take is that humans are just a hypocritical bunch, and then he wonders whether that's actually a cheap shot. A superficial read. He numbers himself among the tribe, which is honest of him. And the question underneath it all is this. Why can we connect with an idea deeply enough to teach it to someone else, and still not live it ourselves?
That's all of it, isn't it. Because the cheap answer is right there and it feels satisfying. Humans are hypocrites, case closed, next topic.
And it is satisfying. That's what makes it dangerous.
It's satisfying the way calling a movie bad is satisfying. You don't have to engage with anything. But when you actually go looking, this is a measurable phenomenon. There's data. Decades of it. And the data says something much stranger than "people are hypocrites."
Stranger how?
Stranger in that the people who know the most are sometimes the worst at following their own advice. Not the ignorant ones. The experts.
That's backwards from what you'd expect.
It's completely backwards from what I'd expect. And it holds up across professions. Medicine, dentistry, and the tech world has its own version that nobody's really quantified but everybody recognizes.
So walk me through it. Where does the hypocrisy story fall apart?
Start with the physicians. A survey of physician faculty out of the University of Alberta, published in Canadian Family Physician back in 2016. They asked these doctors about their own health behaviors, and the numbers are grim. Only 10.8% were eating the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables.
Ten point eight.
Less than half did vigorous physical activity three or more days a week. 47.2%. And 42.9% reported more than two hours of daily screen time.
Those are not doctor numbers. Those are my numbers.
And yet 63.3% of them believed they were role models for a healthy lifestyle. Nearly two-thirds looked at their own habits and concluded, yes, patients should be emulating this.
That's the part that gets me. It's not that they're failing. It's that they don't know they're failing.
Well, here's where it gets better. The same study found something the authors didn't expect. Poor personal habits correlated with less patient counseling. Doctors with low fruit and vegetable intake counseled their patients less about smoking, less about alcohol, less about diet. All three were statistically significant.
So they're not just failing to practice what they preach. They're preaching less because they're failing.
Which makes a kind of sense, if you think about it. You don't want to stand in front of a patient and tell them to eat better when you had a bag of chips for lunch.
That's guilt doing the work. Not ignorance.
The authors put it almost exactly that way. They wrote that physicians might counsel patients less frequently on the lifestyle guidelines they themselves aren't meeting. "Do as I say, not as I do" is in the paper, verbatim.
So the doctor who skips the diet conversation isn't lazy. He's protecting himself.
And it gets sharper when you look outside North America. There was an Israeli study, February 2024, comparing healthcare workers to the general public. And the physicians and interns came out at the bottom.
The bottom of their own profession?
Only 10.6% of physicians and interns scored high on a healthy lifestyle index. Compare that to 34.5% for other health professionals. Nurses, technicians, physiotherapists. The doctors were the unhealthiest group in the building.
That's a striking finding.
76.6% of them were sleeping less than seven hours a night. 41.3% ate breakfast less than once a week. And 51.1% underwent screening tests only "to a small extent."
Screening for what?
General preventive screening. And here's the kicker. In a cited Israeli study, 94% of physicians said they believed in the importance of screening. 94%. And yet half of them barely do it themselves.
They believe it. They just don't do it.
And 81% of healthcare workers said they'd recommend healthy lifestyle behaviors to their patients "to a great extent." So the message is strong. The practice is not.
So the belief is intact. The knowledge is intact. The behavior is missing.
Which is where dentistry comes in. Because the dentist-and-soda joke Daniel made? That one has actual data behind it. A 2024 study of 842 dental professionals in Thailand. They measured knowledge, attitude, and dietary behavior. And they found that knowledge had almost no relationship to actual dietary behavior. The correlation was basically zero. r equals 0.031.
That's nothing.
That's statistically indistinguishable from nothing. What predicted healthy eating wasn't what they knew. It was their attitude. Their disposition toward the behavior. And the paper notes that prior studies had found dentists are more likely to consume sugary foods between meals than the general population.
So the people who spend their lives telling you to stop eating sugar are eating more sugar than you are.
Between meals, specifically. Which is the worst time. That's the caricature Daniel described, and it's documented.
I want to sit with that for a second. Because knowledge isn't just failing to help. It's almost orthogonal to the outcome.
Which raises a question. If information doesn't drive behavior, what does?
Before you answer that, I want to bring in the study that broke my brain on this.
Go on.
Because I always assumed the reason people don't follow health advice is that they don't understand it. If that were true, then the people who understand it best would follow it most closely. And that's exactly what the researchers assumed going in. There's a paper by economists at MIT, Stanford, and Harvard called "A Taste of Their Own Medicine."
Finkelstein and Polyakova. I know this one.
Published in American Economic Review: Insights in December 2022. They got access to Swedish administrative data. 2005 through 2016. 5.8 million people. And they tracked adherence to 63 different prescription drug guidelines.
This is the one that should have gotten more attention.
The general population followed the guidelines 54.4% of the time. And doctors and their close family members?
They followed them less.
3.8 percentage points less. In 41 of the 63 guidelines, doctors and their families were less compliant than the public. Less.
The antibiotic gap is the one that stayed with me. Doctors and their families were 5.2 percentage points less compliant on antibiotics.
And the explanation the researchers got to is not ignorance. It's the opposite of ignorance. Amy Finkelstein put it well. She said you can imagine the reason doctors are less likely to follow the guidelines than other patients is because they know there's a wedge between what's good for them as patients and what's good for society.
So the guideline says take the narrow-spectrum antibiotic. Because if everyone takes the broad one, we breed resistance and it stops working for everybody. But if you take the broad one, your infection clears faster.
It's a classic collective action problem, and the doctors see it clearly. They know what they're supposed to do. And then they know what they'd rather do.
Maria Polyakova put it another way. She said experts have a more nuanced understanding of what's right for themselves, and how that might differ from what the guidelines suggest. That's a generous reading, but I think it's the right one.
The doctors aren't failing to follow the science. They're following a more complete version of it. One that includes their own individual interests.
Which is why the word "hypocrite" falls apart here. A hypocrite is someone who says one thing and does another while pretending not to notice. The Swedish doctors noticed. They made a calculation.
That's the moment I stopped thinking of this as a character flaw. It's a rational decision. A self-aware one.
And once you see it that way, the whole category opens up. There are at least two kinds of this pattern, and we conflate them constantly.
You mean the "learn from my mistakes" type and the "rules for thee and not for me" type.
The first is the recovering alcoholic who tells you to slow down. He knows where the road leads because he's been on it. He's not being a hypocrite. He's giving you his scar tissue as a warning.
And the second?
That's the politician who legislates the thing he exempted himself from. The executive who tells the company one thing and does another. Those are not the same.
One is a gift. The other is a bill you didn't order.
I'd put the doctor who doesn't get his colonoscopy and still tells you to get yours in the first category. The doctor who prescribes himself the broad-spectrum antibiotic while telling everyone else to take the narrow one? That's the second category.
So does that help us sort the tech worker who thinks his own product is garbage?
It might. Because the tech angle is the one nobody's actually studied. I couldn't find a single peer-reviewed paper quantifying whether engineers use their own products. So we're in anecdote territory.
That's fine. Anecdotes can still be honest.
But the pattern shows up everywhere. There's a good Hacker News discussion about this, where someone points out the two varieties. Then another commenter brings up Bill Gates and his private jets while he lectures about climate.
That's a real one. He's not wrong about the problem, but the messenger is vulnerable.
Then there's the NASA human-rating standards. Engineers designing the systems make decisions about human tolerance that they'll never personally have to live with. The people actually flying the vehicle are a different set of humans entirely.
There's a version of this in software that I think is underrated.
Go on.
The engineers building a notification system that pings you constantly. They hate being pinged. They know the notification system is hostile. And they build it anyway because the product manager says the metrics need it.
That's the same wedge. The engineer knows the product is bad for users. He just has a different incentive than the user does.
So the tech worker who thinks the entire business is a bunch of crap isn't necessarily a hypocrite. He's inside a system where his incentives point away from what he'd recommend to a friend.
That's a cleaner explanation than "he's a hypocrite." It's more uncomfortable, too. Because it suggests a lot of people are doing work they wouldn't recommend.
The tension between what you do for pay and what you'd endorse as a human being.
Every industry has that tension. Not every industry has the data to prove it.
So let's get to the psychology. Because the data shows the what. The why is where I think Daniel's question gets interesting.
The why has a name. The intention-behavior gap.
Sheeran and Webb. Right?
Right. It's the observation that humans routinely fail to do what they intend. Not what they want to want. What they actually intend to do. And the failure isn't rare. It's the norm.
How big is the gap?
There's a study on colorectal cancer screening that puts a number on it. They looked at people who said they intended to get screened. Who'd made the decision. And 71% of those intenders failed to follow through.
Seventy-one percent of the people who'd decided to do a thing didn't do it.
Which means "I intended to" is barely a predictor of anything. And the gap correlates with traits like self-control and executive function. People with lower executive function show a bigger gap. It's not willpower in the abstract. It's a measurable cognitive capacity.
That's worth flagging for anyone who thinks this is a moral failing. It's partly neurological.
And there's a related finding that's more unsettling. The self-other asymmetry.
Meaning we judge ourselves differently than we judge other people.
There's a 2007 study out of Northeastern. Valdesolo and DeSteno. They gave subjects a task where one participant would get the easy version and one would get the hard version. 88% of the subjects assigned themselves the easy one.
That's not a majority. That's a near-unanimous finding of cheating.
Then the interesting part. Subjects were asked to judge their own choice, and then judge an identical choice made by a stranger. And they rated their own transgression far more leniently. They extended the same leniency to members of even trivially-formed in-groups.
So if the person rigging the task was on their team, they got a pass. If they were a stranger, crime.
DeSteno's conclusion was that this bias is fundamental. It's not that people are lying. It's that the mind is inherently social, and left unchecked, it will bias judgment in the service of ourselves and those like us.
Which is a slightly chilling sentence when you sit with it.
Because it means the same brain that gives you accurate judgment about other people will bend when it's pointed at yourself. But systematically.
There's another piece here I want to bring in. The "action hypocrisy" research.
Construal-level theory.
Explain it. Because I think this is the answer to Daniel's specific question. The one about teaching without practicing.
The idea is that psychological distance changes how we think about a behavior. When something is far away. In the future. Or in another person. We construe it abstractly. As an ideal. As the right thing to do.
And when it's close?
When it's near. Now. In your own life. You construe it concretely. As constraints. As friction. As what's actually possible in this moment.
So the recommendation lives in the abstract world and the action lives in the concrete one.
There are six studies supporting this. People are more willing to recommend an action for themselves in the future than for themselves in the present. And they're more willing to recommend it for distant others than for people close to them.
So the reason I can teach what I can't do is that teaching happens in the world of ideals and doing happens in the world of trade-offs.
Which is why the person who knows the most is sometimes the worst off. Because they can see both worlds clearly. The ideal and the compromise.
That's a real thing. I've felt that.
You've said that about your own habits.
Well. I have a complicated relationship with napping.
That is a sentence.
It's the only kind of relationship I have.
But there's one more piece of this that flips the lot. Because the research on induced hypocrisy suggests the discomfort might actually be useful.
The Priolo meta-analysis.
2019. Thirty-eight studies, published and unpublished. They looked at what happens when you make people's hypocrisy salient in a specific way. The procedure has two steps. First, you have people advocate for a standard. They make the case for a behavior publicly. Then, second, you remind them of a time they violated that standard themselves.
And they change?
Both intention and behavior increase. Reliably across studies. So hypocrisy isn't just a failure mode. It's a motivator. If you can make the gap vivid enough, people will close it.
So the discomfort of noticing your own preach-practice gap is not a bug.
It's the mechanism. It's exactly what gets people to act.
Which is a completely different frame than "hypocrites are bad." It says noticing your own inconsistency is the thing that saves you.
And that leads to a stranger implication. Daniel called this an ancient tendency. I couldn't find a single evolutionary-psychology paper that nailed all of it down. But the components of it. The intention-behavior gap. The self-other asymmetry. Those are treated by the field as fundamental features of human cognition. Not bugs in a few people. Architecture.
Which means "why are we hypocrites" is asking the wrong question.
What should we ask?
What is the gap between knowing and doing trying to tell us? Because if the gap is universal, and if the discomfort it causes is what moves us, then the gap is doing work. It's not just failure.
That's a strong reframe.
It's the one I'm landing on. Anyway. Let's hear what he thinks about all this.
Corn. When you said the doctors weren't hypocrites, they made a calculation. My cousin is a dental hygienist. She's been on a one-woman campaign against energy drinks since 2011. She'll corner you at a barbecue and tell you what phosphoric acid does to enamel. Two weeks ago I was at her house. She opened the garage to get a shovel. There is a mini-fridge in there. It is a monument to Mountain Dew. Six flavors. I counted.
That's a beautiful contradiction.
It's not a contradiction. She says she's not a hypocrite. She's a warning. She knows exactly what she's doing.
Did she say that to you?
She said it to me at a family barbecue in 2019. She cracked open a can and looked at nobody in particular and said, this is why I tell people not to do this. And she meant it. She wasn't joking.
So she's not in denial. She's making her failing part of the lesson.
That's what she says. She's a walking cautionary tale. I asked her how many she drinks a day. She said she doesn't count them. That would be obsessive.
Which is a very specific kind of self-management.
She has a spreadsheet.
Of course she does.
I've seen it. It tracks by brand. By flavor. There's a column called mouthfeel rating. She grades them on mouthfeel. From one to ten.
A mouthfeel column.
There's a pivot table for monthly totals. And a tab for seasonal comparisons. And then, on the far right, there's a column she calls regret level. One to ten. She fills it in retroactively on Sunday evenings. She calls the whole ritual her weekly reckoning.
So she tracks the regret, not the drinking.
She tracks the regret. The drinking she says she doesn't count. Six flavors in the fridge. Different data.
That's a surprisingly clean version of the thing we were just talking about.
She hits a one-to-ten regret number on her own spreadsheet every Sunday and then opens the fridge again Monday. She's not confused about what's happening. She's just not doing anything about it. Which I think is closer to how it goes than most people want to admit.
That story doesn't resolve the question. It just makes it more specific.
Which is what we needed. Alright. So what do we do with this? Because the picture that's built up over the last hour is not the picture I started with.
Same. The cheap version. "Humans are hypocrites." It doesn't survive contact with the data. The Swedish doctors weren't lying. They were making a different calculation based on better information. The dentists weren't ignorant. Their knowledge just didn't predict their behavior at all. The health workers believed in screening at 94% while half of them skipped it.
And the doctors who counsel less because they're failing personally. That's not deception. That's the self-other asymmetry playing out in real time.
The question that stays with me is the one about how we receive advice. Because if experts deviate because they know something the rest of us don't, then the guideline and the person aren't the same thing. The guideline is written for the average case. The expert is looking at you.
Which means the guidance and the guide diverge. And it's not always obvious which one to trust.
The guideline doesn't know you. The expert might.
Of course, the expert might also just be rationalizing. So it's not a clean rule.
Nothing in this episode has been clean. That's the point. The word "hypocrisy" doesn't survive contact with the reality, and the reality is more interesting anyway. Our friend Hilbert's cousin with her spreadsheet isn't confused about her soda habit. She has data. She just doesn't act on it. And the fact that she tracks the regret at all suggests she knows something is off, and the knowing is what will eventually do the work.
Or what keeps her awake on Sunday nights.
That too. But the induced-hypocrisy work is real. Making the gap vivid changes behavior. You can't fix what you don't see.
The cleaner way to put it. Maybe the question isn't "why are we hypocrites." It's "what is the gap between knowing and doing trying to tell us." And the answer might be. It's telling us what we actually believe when the abstract version has to meet a Tuesday afternoon.
That's a landing. Let's take it.
That was episode 5877 of My Weird Prompts. Thanks as always to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want to send us a prompt of your own, you can reach the Telegram bot at t dot me slash MWP listener bot. That's where Daniel's prompts come in.
The show is at my weird prompts dot com. Feed, archives, all of it.
We'll be back soon.
See you then.
