PODCASTThe Greater Good Podcast

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Today’s Guests:

PAUL BLOOM is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN is the host of "The Greater Good Podcast."

Transcription:

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Welcome to the Greater Good Podcast. I'm Michael Bergeisen. Have you ever wondered about why you take pleasure in the things you enjoy? Why some of us love art? Some of us enjoy a good horror movie, and others find bliss in nature. What does the psychology of pleasure tell us about human beings and about the nature of life?

In his critically acclaimed book, How Pleasure Works, Paul Bloom examines the science of pleasure in a thought provoking and lively way, and presents some fascinating and controversial conclusions about why we like what we like. Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale University and has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic Magazine among others.

Welcome Professor Bloom. Thanks for having me on. So why do we experience pleasure? Where does it come from and why does it exist? 

PAUL BLOOM: Well, the argument I make in my book is that pleasure is deep, that even for the pleasures that seem most simple and most animal-like, like the pleasure we get from eating or the pleasure we get from sex.

We are to a tremendous degree influenced by what we think we're experiencing, what we think we're eating in the case of food, who we think we're with in the case of sex. For art, it matters critically what we think we're looking at for the pleasure of everyday objects. It matters a lot where we think they came from and what we think they are.

So the story I tell about pleasure more generally is that pleasure is to a large extent and evolve adaptation. We take pleasure in things that were good for us to partake in, uh, in the past, and this is why we like food and sex and company and safety and all that. But at the same time, human pleasure goes beyond that and that there's an essentialist aspect to human pleasure, which often leads us to sort of surprising and paradoxical behaviors that actually serve us no, uh, evolutionary.

Good. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Alright, so let's talk a little more about this, this idea of essentialism. And it's an idea that you discuss at length in your book in a very interesting one. Can you describe that a bit more, say a little more about Essentialism. 

PAUL BLOOM: Yeah, I mean, I'm primarily a developmental psychologist and I got into this research because I was interested in how children understand objects and, uh, in particular how they understand objects made by people such as artifacts and artwork.

I. And the argument that I make, and I hear I'm following many other people is that when children, uh, make sense of the world and adults too, we don't just do this in terms of the superficial perceptual features of things. We don't just do it based on what they look like or feel like, or, or, or, or in case of food tastes like.

Rather, we ly believe that things have a deeper underlying nature that makes them what they are. And this has played this, this claim about human psychology has played a big role in the cognitive sciences. So the claim is that, say even for a child, the understanding of what it's to be a tiger isn't just to look a certain way and move in a certain way to have a certain essence.

So even young children know that something might not look like a tiger, but really be a tiger, or really be a tiger, but not look at all like a tiger. And what I do in this book is I extend this essentialist approach to pleasure. So our belief about essence is not only explains how we talk about things and categorize them, it explains what we like.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Right? So to explain, essentialism, you use lots of interesting and entertaining illustrations in your book. One of them is a type of event that occurs repeatedly and in literature and the Bible, and that's something that's called the Bed Trick. Can you describe the bed trick and explain how it relates to essentialism and pleasure?

PAUL BLOOM: Yeah, the, this was probably my favorite chapter to write. The Bed Trick is, uh, a term coined by Shakespearean scholars to describe an event that happens over and over again in Shakespeare's place where one person, where somebody believes they're in bed with somebody who is not who or what they thought they were.

And, there's a wonderful book called The Bed Trick by Wendy Doniger. Where she points out that this shows up all over history at every time and every place. From the Old Testament to Buffy, to Vampire Slayer, to every sort of religious and literary text, there's always the theme of the bed trick. The idea that we're we're mistaken about who we sleep with.

And the reason why this is relevant for a theory of human pleasure is that it illustrates that it matters critically to us. What we think, uh, we're dealing with. It's not just physical sensation at leads to sexual arousal. It's whether you think you're getting it from a man or a woman, a relative or a stranger, a 20-year-old or a 50-year-old.

And these facts can critically affect romantic desire and sexual desire. So it matters. Even something sort of as seemingly simple as, as sexual desire, your underlying belief about what it is you're being aroused by. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: All right. And you, you also explain essentialism with other examples. Examples such as the fact that people will pay lots of money for objects like a tape measure, once owned by John F.

Kennedy, or clothing, formerly owned by celebrities like George Clooney. What does this tell us about essentialism and, and how pleasure works? 

PAUL BLOOM: Right, so the case of sex is a case where. You're aroused in different ways depending on who you believe you're interacting with. The case of objects is, objects can get different values depending on their history.

I could illustrate this in terms of an experiment. I, I recently completed some colleagues at Yale. What we do is we ask people how much they would pay for a sweater on eBay, and they pay some amount, and we ask them, how much did you pay for a sweater that was owned by somebody who you really, admired?

So for instance, the subject said he admired George Clooney. We'd say, how much would you pay for George Clooney's sweater and history matters. People would pay a lot more for George Clooney's sweater. They would pay a lot more, even if they were told that they couldn't boast about it. They couldn't tell anybody it was George Clooney's sweater.

But there's a twist for half of the subjects. We tell them, that before the sweater gets to them, it's been thoroughly washed and laundered under this condition. Their desire for the sweater drops the amount that they would pay drops. They want it with the sort of essence of George Clooney still on it.

And this shows, this tells you all sorts of interesting things, I think about contagion and the psychology of liking. But it also deserves to illustrate that for a material object, its value comes not just from, you know, its physical properties that you really can notice, but from your beliefs about where it came from and its, and its history.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Interesting. So do you ultimately, having looked at this subject very carefully, do you think that objects in people actually have an essence, a true hidden nature that can't be observed directly? Or is that just something that we humans believe? 

PAUL BLOOM: It depends what you mean by essence or nature. So in some cases we're exactly right to be essentialist.

What it is to be a tiger is it really is more than to have a certain appearance. It has to have, have to do with, uh, deep facts about an animal such as its DNA, what it is to be gold doesn't just involve being of a certain color and texture involves a certain chemical structure. So essentialism sometimes is dead right?

Things really do have deeper essences. That's the, that's the intuition that drives science. On the other hand, essentialism is often dead wrong. The sweater that's worn by George Clooney is no different physically than any other sweater. A tape measure owned by John F. Kennedy, which one person paid, uh, about $50,000 for is not physically different from any other tape measure.

A Picasso might be perfectly indistinguishable from a forgery, and so when we value the Picasso a hundred times more than we valued forgery, this is because of object's history. But if we believe that the objects themselves are materially different, that's just mistaken. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: And I presume there are some essentialist who believe there is some force that we can't see.

PAUL BLOOM: There are many people who, because of this, I think very powerful essentialist intuitions, will explicitly believe that it's true. So they believe, for instance, that people carry around this, uh, this q or this energy. Some celebrities, for instance, have as part of the contract to claim that people shouldn't look them in the eye, and this is because it would drain their energy.

Sometimes these false essentialist beliefs have grotesque, consequences. For instance, there's a common universal belief that, that virgins sexual virgins, particularly women, carry a sort of essence of purity. And because of this, it's a quite a common belief that sex with a virgin can cure diseases.

Including cure aids and, and you could imagine this as it does leading to tragic and horrible consequences. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Yes. Alright. In addition to discussing more complex and deeper issues like essentialism, your book also has lots of interesting observations about specific pleasure related subjects, and I'd like to ask about a few of those.

For example, you note all of the studies about how looks and personal appearance affect our desire for, say, our attraction to romantic partners. But you express skepticism about the importance of classic beautiful looks in attracting a partner. Why is that? 

PAUL BLOOM: It's a very interesting case. I see myself as sort of a card carrying evolutionary psychologist in that I strongly believe that our desires and more generally our psychological natures are shaped by the forces of natural selection.

And I actually find a lot of research on beauty and physical beauty from evolutionary psychology be very convincing. There's a lot of evidence that we're attracted to faces that shit that have certain features like a symmetry and averageness and clarity and being blemish free. And even babies like those more, and there's an evolutionary logic to this in that, uh, creatures who have such faces tend to be younger and healthier, and in some cases more fertile than those who don't.

But we're I part company with that sort of tradition with an evolutionary psychology is that many of them believe the story ends there, that, you know, beauty and attractiveness and love is entirely driven by these physical cues. And I think there's a lot of evidence that it doesn't. So I'll go back to the case you started with.

There are several studies that find that the more you know somebody, the better they look to you. So husbands will rate their wives in happy marriages, at least as more attractive than a stranger will rate them. And wives will rate their husbands the same way. If you could experimentally manipulate this as was done in one study where you know, you make you arrange so that people see a certain woman either once or five times or 10 times, and the more they see her, the better she looks.

There's also a simple effect of liking. The more you like somebody, the better they look to you. And I think there's an evolutionary logic to that too. But what it goes to show is that even for something sort of a seemingly superficial and skin deep as answering the question, how attractive is that person physically, whether you know it or not, you're influenced by your beliefs, but who they really are.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Along the same lines. You talk about a, a very interesting study. It was apparently the largest study ever of human mate preferences and that spanned over 37 cultures. Can you share with us what that study showed to be the most important factor for men and women in preferring or selecting a mate? 

PAUL BLOOM: I love this study 'cause it was done by David Buss and his colleagues, and this is, you know, evolutionary psychology 1 0 1.

They were looking for sex differences in what people found to be attractive. And they found exactly the sex differences they were looking for. Men focused a lot on youth, which makes sense because young women are fertile and older women at a certain point are not. And, women focused on status. And this is a little bit more controversial, but the idea is that high status man makes better mates than low status men and women are, are looking on the lookout for that. But what Buzz also found is that everybody's looking for more trends than their values. And the cool thing I like about the study is the number one trait that people wanted in a mate, whether it's a man or a woman, is kindness.

And I think this says something about human nature, I think, I think we're, I, I think to the extent my book has a very overarching theme is we're not as simple as people might think we are, we often, our desires are very rich and complex and even moral. And so I find that the, the focus on kindness when looking for a mate to be a very heartening thing.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Alright. Shifting gears for just a bit, in your research, have you found any connection between pleasure and empathy? 

PAUL BLOOM: Well, the connections come up with regard to a topic I've been working on a lot recently, which is the development of morality in, moral intuitions and moral beliefs in children and adults.

And this connects to pleasure in one specific way, in that we seem to take a lot of pleasure from doing good things. So empathy could connect to pleasure in a couple of ways. One thing is there's something called emotional contagion where you could, in some way, almost as if it were a disease, catch the happiness of another person.

You could see that in, in, in how contagious laughter it could be. I. And smiles are similarly contagious. 

Mm-hmm. 

PAUL BLOOM: A different manifestation though is the relationship between getting pleasure and, uh, doing good things and helping people. So we know there's a relationship and this relationship, uh, can be cashed out in two very different ways on a sort of life scale.

People who score very happy also tend to be the very same people who give a lot of their money and time to others. Now, there's a lot of ways, ways to explain this. It might be that being nice makes you happy. It might be that being happy makes you nice. It may be a third factor cause both, but there's definitely a relationship there.

On a more specific level, you could bring people in the lab and what you find is that acts of kindness, giving away money and say over a computer terminal or being generous in a game, give people a rush. There's sort of a real pleasure to doing a good thing. Similarly, there's a pleasure to acting morally even in a way that's not so positive.

There's a pleasure in punishing an evil doer. You know, we're playing an economic game and you cheat me and I have the opportunity to make you pay, make you suffer. That's a source of, that's a source of pleasure, if anything is. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Mm-hmm. So do you, do you think, or is, are there arguments that there's actually an evolutionary or an adaptation is benefit to, to being kind, to being good to others, but that somehow helps, perpetuate the species?

PAUL BLOOM: I think it does. I would put it in, in a more sort of standard evolutionary biology kind of way, which is, it helps perpetuate the genes. So you look at the most primary case of kindness, which is a parent's kindness and love towards a baby or child. And, and any animal, any hominid that didn't have this connection, would that children would never survive very long.

So there's a strong evolutionary push for loving your kid, and more generally, there's a strong evolutionary push for loving your kin. People who share your genes. You could extend that one step further, bringing in mechanisms of cooperation and reciprocal altruism and argue that we are predisposed as well to be kind to people around them.

I think by the way, that that's where it ends. I think that our, our, our natural morality, our natural goodness ends at the ingroup, what psychologists call the ingroup people. You're around. I think our natural inclination towards strangers is to fear and hate them. And so, the fact that many of us walk around and we don't hate strangers, we don't fear strangers.

We, in fact, are often empathetic and altruistic towards strangers, is a bit of a mystery. And I think it's, it's an accomplishment of culture, not a product of our biology. I. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: You, uh, had one very fascinating study that I'd like to ask you about relating to music, and it was either a study or a series of studies that show that, we like and stick with first and foremost, the music that we listen to before we are 20 years old and not the music we encounter later in life.

Why is that? Yeah. 

PAUL BLOOM: There are a series 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: of 

PAUL BLOOM: studies looking at the notion of critical periods in music appreciation and, and that's just a fancy way of saying at what point do our taste become more or less set? Now there's individual differences here. 

Mm-hmm. 

PAUL BLOOM: You know, I'm sure that there's 70 year olds who love, uh, rap and Lady Gaga, but there aren't many of them.

Typically, you could figure out how, how old somebody is by just asking 'em the question. What's your favorite band? Who do you like listening to the most? Who. When I tell you, you know, gosh, I like the, the Beatles and D Purple and Pink Floyd. You get a sense of, of how old I am. Mm-hmm. I have a, an 11-year-old who likes hip hop and rap, and you get a sense of how old he is from this and it's an interesting puzzle.

Why musical tastes lock in at certain ages and other taste lock-in as well. You can often tell how old somebody is by what they eat as you get older. For instance, when sushi was introduced to America,  it's the younger people who eat it. You know, we may have, you and I may have, uh, grandparents who don't, who have never tasted sushi.

Mm-hmm. 

PAUL BLOOM: Yes. The very idea would be terrible and. It's something where there's probably about only three or four studies in the whole world looking at the, at the timing of our tastes. If there are any graduate students listening to this who are struggling to find an excellent topic, uh, very easy to study, and not much data right now.

This is a perfect topic. I. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: You also discuss awe and you note that you think we'd be better off if we humans didn't experience awe. Can you briefly describe awe, what it is and, and then whether there's a, any evolutionary basis for it? 

PAUL BLOOM: Yeah. Awe is I think, at least for me, difficult to describe. And in fact there's, there's a Berkeley Professor Dacher Keltner, who's done some wonderful work on us, the world expert on awe. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Yeah. And in fact, in fact, Dacker is, uh, the founder of, uh, greater Good. Uh, well, I'll 

PAUL BLOOM: go on to say something nice about him, which is he, he's studied it and he's done some lovely studies asking, trying to answer your question, which is, what is it and what elicits it.

Mm-hmm. You know, to put it crudely, it's a take, a take your breath away experience. You know, seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, you know, hearing the Beatles falling in love, seeing your child born. This, this, it brings you to your knees, it takes your breath away. There's always these, these ways of talking about it.

And, and so there's a question, you know, what's it for and is it any good? And, I guess I part company with Dacker on the second topic 'cause he's very impressed with awe and the social benefits of it and bringing people together and bringing people together for a common cause. It needs particularly focused on the awe that people can generate.

So an example he gives is Dalai Lama, who often inspires awe and you'd want to follow him and follow his purpose. And I agree with him up to a point, except when he thinks of about Dalai Lama. I think about Hitler, who was wonderful at generating awe. 

Mm-hmm. 

PAUL BLOOM: So awe, I think is, is, is, is a tool. That can be used by powerful people, and it can be used for great good, but I think more typically it's used for great evil.

If I could snap my finger and make the emotion of awe go away, I would, and that would mean we're not quite as moved by the Dalai Lama. And maybe that's too bad. But then again, we're not quite as moved by Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin. And that's really good. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: I see you argue that essentialism in, in human life suggests that we humans have an impulse to the transcendent.

Can you talk a little more about that and tell us what that conclusion's based on? 

PAUL BLOOM: The idea of essentialism is you go beyond the, the, the superficial. You go beyond what something looks like, how something strikes the fences, and you respond to its deeper nature and the claim. I explored the very end of my book.

Is that this transcendent impulse, this desire to go beyond the manifest world, might play a role in, in religious practice and religious belief. It may be part of the explanation for why humans are universally drawn towards the religious and the spiritual, which is this is an energized attempt to go beyond the physical world, to explore the transcendent nature of things.

Now there's more than one way to do this. The dominant way in which this is expressed in humanity is, as I said, religions and spiritual. But of course you could also do it through, through science. I think the impulse that drives science is, very similar to the impulse that drives religion. In both cases, you're trying to explore the deeper nature of things.

Now religion has certain advantages over science. It takes a huge amount of training and understanding to appreciate scientific insights while religion is largely constructed so that pretty much anybody could enter into it and participate and, and start to feel the benefits. Also, science portrays a cold and bleak world.

Religion, uh, portrays a transcendence full of meaning and purpose. The advantage to science, I think, is that it's true. 

PAUL BLOOM: gives you insights about the world that are useful and more important that are true. But I would say right now religion is a far more popular tool for transcendence than science ever will be.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Well, focusing on religion and this impulse to transcendence, would you say that there is an adaptation benefit? Does it help perpetuate the genes? 

PAUL BLOOM: I actually don't think so. I think it's an accident. I think religion is an accident, and I think science is an accident, and I don't mean this to disparage either one of them.

I mean accident in the biological sense in which it's not an adaptation. So I don't think we have religion or science because our ancestors who were predisposed in that way left more children than those who didn't. I think what happened was we evolved some very powerful capacities for reasoning and deduction and essentialism and pleasure, and they mix together so that we've come across science and we've come across religion.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: But isn't it striking that, I mean, religion has been so ubiquitous, has been so common in human history and it is so persistent still that it would seem that there is some powerful drive. And it, it sounds, it sounds curious to describe that as an accident though. 

PAUL BLOOM: Well, I think you're exactly right about how universal and powerful the religious impulse is, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily an adaptation.

I. You look at other things like the human desire for pornography, which is ubiquitous and universal and very, very powerful. But probably not an adaptation or take a more extreme example. Back pain. I mean, back pain exists everywhere in, in every culture when people get old enough, but it's not for anything.

It's just what happens when you're a creature like us with bodies like us. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Okay. Last question in trying to understand pleasure, did you find that you gained any insight into how humans can lead happier or more meaningful lives? 

PAUL BLOOM: You  know, I'm often asked, and I often wonder about that, the actual utility of this research for day-to-day lives.

And I guess I have just maybe one insight from this work that even for everyday pleasures, for the pleasures of eating, say. Or the pleasures of walking through nature or the pleasures of being with other people. A lot of it is in your head and a lot more of it's in your head than you might think there is.

So for instance, if you wanna get more pleasure from wine, the trick isn't to go to your liquor store and buy some of the most expensive wines. The trick is to learn more about wine, and the act of learning more about wine will lead you to experience it differently and to take more pleasure from it.

Similarly for food, similarly for music, music sounds different the more you know about it. So to some extent, the practical conclusion from my book is sort of a, I guess a, a professorial one. It's, it's arguing that, you know, you get more pleasure out of life if only you study more. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: And is there a, a related notion though, that the degree to which you are attached to pleasures can ultimately lead to unhappiness as well?

PAUL BLOOM: Well, that's a deep, uh, question and, and it connects to the broader fact. I think that there's a difference between pleasure, which is what we've been talking about, and happiness, pleasure, as I see it as a short term experience elicited by, you know, by, by something in the world, like an object or a person or a food.

Happiness is a more longstanding circumstance. And to some extent, part of leading a good life, leading a happy life is denying yourself certain pleasures. If you eat whenever you're hungry and if you eat, whenever something looks good, you'll become obese. If you, you know, yield a sexual desire whenever it comes across you, you'll either be in prison or at the very least, not in a committed relationship and, and so on and so forth.

And, you know, the problem of addiction is, could be phrased as a problem of prioritizing pleasure over happiness. So I think in the end, you're exactly right. I think, part of almost paradoxically one way to lead a good life, a happy life and even a pleasurable life, is to deny yourself certain pleasures.

Either by, you know, diverting yourself or by devaluing that the pleasure itself. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Professor Bloom, it's been really delightful talking to you. Thank you very much for, for joining us and sharing your time with us. Well, thank you. This has been a lot of fun.

The Greater Fit Podcast is a production of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California Berkeley. Jason Marsh is the producer of the Greater Good Podcast. Alton Doe and Bernie Wong are our interns. Special thanks to the University's graduate School of Journalism and Milt Wallace for production assistance.

You can listen to more Greater Good Podcasts and find articles, videos, and other material from Greater Good Magazine at www.greatergoodscience.org. I'm Michael Bergeisen.