And the topic of this section is emotions. A guy goes to his mother and says, mother
after 40 years, I finally decide to get married.
And the mother is so happy. She's just filled with joy.
And she said, why don't you bring your future wife to dinner?
And the guy said, that's wonderful. I'll bring her over Saturday night.
But he says, you know, over the last two years mother, I dated two other women and
I'm still friends with all of them, and we're, why don't I bring all three women
to dinner and why don't you meet all three women and then let's see if we could
guess, if you could guess which is the one I'm going to marry.
The mother said, that's great. He brings all three women to dinner.
His mother talks to one. She talked to the second.
She talked to the third. After about an hour, she points to one of
them and she said, I know which one. It's this one.
This is the one you're going to marry. And the guy is amazed.
He looks at this mother and said, mother, how well do you know me?
How well do you understand me? I loved all of these three women.
I'm friends with all of them. I appreciate all of them.
But indeed, this is the one that I'm going to spend all of my life with.
What gave it away? What gave it away?
And the mother looks at him and she says, it's the only one I hate.
What is it about emotions? It turns out there are two sides to our
decision making. There's the rational side and there's the
emotional side. And what's interesting is that not only do
we have these two sides. They don't simply add up.
Sometimes when emotions are evoked they take over and they basically eliminate our
rational side. And in this section we will think about
how emotions actually work, when they overpower us, under what conditions, and
how do they get us to make either bad decisions and sometimes even good
decisions. [music].
Emotions we all have them, we all experience them.
The question is, what do we know about them and how do they actually work and how
they influence our decision making? So Pascal said, we arrive at the truth not
by reason alone, but also by the heart. And this is the idea that we have these
two separate inputs into decision making. We have an input from our cognitive system
and we have an input from the limbic system.
In very general, simplistic, maybe oversimplistic terms, we think about the
brain as having two systems. We think about the system that is internal
to the brain and the inside of the brain that is more the emotional system.
And then we have the neocortex that surrounds it, which is more of the
thoughtful system. And what's interesting is that those
systems do have some kind of separate inputs, separate outputs, and separate
ways of, of thinking. So, the way that our decisions, we arrive
at them at the end of the day, is not just the two of them together, but it kind of
separate from the two systems. And lots of theorizing have been going on
and something called system one or system two, the emotional system, the cognitive
system. But for today, I want to just concentrate
on the emotional system, and say what do we know about the system?
How does it operate? How does it give us signals?
And now, from an evolutionary perspective, the way to think about that, is to think
about. Imagine you were in the jungle 100,000
years ago. And imagine you saw a tiger approaching.
What did you, would you want to do? Would you want to pop up your spreadsheet
and look at the cost and benefits? Should you run, should you stay?
Of course not. You want a system that would take over.
You want a system that would give you a quick command and get you to run as fast
as you can without thinking. And one way to think about this thing is
as if it's an executable program. As if there's a tiger, presses a button in
your brain, that says turn around, run as fast as you can.
Don't think about it. And in fact, it's useful to think about
the emotional system in that way, that it takes inputs from the outside world, and
gets to execute the command. Whether it's about running or fighting or
procreating, that are not really dependent on the cognitive system.
Which means that when we get an input from our emotional system, we've just execute
something as fast as we can without thinking about it to a high degree.
And of'course, we are basically limbic animals.
We are but we share with the rest of the animal kingdom, is our limbic system.
This internal part of the brain is incredibly similar with us and mice and
rats and all across the, the animal kingdom.
Its the cognitive system that separates us.
So, much of the animal kingdom, but they limbic, the central part of the brain.
The emotional part of the brain is something that is very, very similar to
the rest of the, the animals. And because of that, we can study that not
just in human beings, but in all kinds of other animals as well.
So, this is what has stayed with us for longer time.
It's something that started our evolutionary, evolutionary progress.
It's something that we share with the rest of the animals.
Something that is incredibly basic. In fact, if you thought about what's more
basic to the human experience? Emotion or cognition?
Cognition separates us to a higher degree from the animal kingdom but emotion is,
has been with us for a longer time. It's what's really us in a deep rooted
way. With this understanding of emotions, it's
something that gets us to act in a particular way.
You see a tiger and you just start running.
You can ask yourself, why do we even have, have to have the feeling of an emotion,
what's called qualia, the feeling of the emotion?
Why? Why can't we just run?
Why do we need to know that there are emotions?
Why you would need to feel those emotions. And the theory for that is that emotions
are not good for that moment. The moment you see a lion you just want to
start running. You don't have to feel anything.
But it's about teaching us for the future. That the quality of the thing about the
feeling of the emotion comes for planning for the future.
So, once you've done a few things, and got some very negative feedback.
It didn't work out very well. This part of the jungle was dangerous this
and so on. Now, the feeling that this emotion is
going to stay with you and you're going to be able to have a lesson from it.
And when you plan for the future, you're going to hopefully do things in a better
way. So, what I wanted you to do now is, I
wanted to think about your own experience of emotions, and you had many of those,
and to think to yourself about what is special about emotions, how emotions
actually work. What can you say from just reflecting on
emotions about how they operate, how long they stay and so on?
If you think about it, you, you realize that emotions are not usual feelings or
thoughts. They are much more primitive.
You realize that they are fast. You realize that they are executed
automatically based on the environment. You realize that they could be moderated,
probably by cognitive processes. The first thing that comes around could be
perceived very differently, depending on what you're thinking on at the time.
Are you in the a comfortable mindset? Are you in an aroused mindset?
And so on. And you also probably realize that they
are transitory. And the transitory part is actually
incredibly important because when something happens and you feel an emotion,
you probably feel at that moment that the emotion would last for a long time.
But the fact is, that the emotion would often go, go down in a faster speed than
you might anticipate. And this, by the way, happens for both
good things and bad things. So, as somebody who was eh, badly injured
a long time ago, if you asked me at early days of my injury how long do I think this
would last and how long would I feel miserable, I would probably think that I
would feel miserable for a really, really long time and it would not get much
better. In fact, over time, it did got better,
better than I expected. Similarly, when you talk to somebody that
had something happy, happening. Winning the lottery, maybe.
You ask them how long will things be happy.
They think it would be long, for a long time.
In fact, it'll be happy but for shorter time than they expect.
There is a lot of experiments on this, by the way.
Dan Gilbert at Harvard has done many of those.
It's about our inability to predict how the future would work in terms of our
adaptation. So, for example, in a standard experiment,
he asked people at, at Harvard about how they would feel if they got tenure or not.
So, at some point, professors are up for tenure and then the university decides if
to give us a job for life or not. And people predict that if they get
tenure, they'll be really, really happy and they will be really, really happy for
a long time. And if they didn't get tenure they will be
really, really miserable and really, really miserable for a long time.
What happens? On the day that people are told that they
got it, they're happy. On the day that they're told they didn't
get it, they're unhappy. But then quite quickly, much quicker than
people anticipate, they get back to the standards of life, they get adjusted to
it. The same thing happens with people who are
moving. People who are moving from Chicago to
California. Think, oh if I only move to California,
where the weather is so good, I will be happy and I'll be happy for a long time.
And people who move from California to Chicago say, if I only move to Chicago,
where it's cold and miserable in the winter, I'll be miserable and be miserable
for really long time. People do get their initial happiness or
this happiness but then they go back to it.
This also by the way, happens with dating. People think that when I break up with my
girlfriend or boyfriend or get a divorce, I'll be really miserable and this misery
would last a long time. It turns out that misery is much more
short lived than people expect. There's lots of things about emotions.
One of the things is that they are temporary and we don't think of them as
temporary. The other thing that is incredibly
important is that when they come up, they take over.
They don't just add to another component. It's not that you think and have
cognition, they seem to be taking over. And in fact, that's what you would want
them to do if you designed emotion as an escape, as an escape plan.
So, let's think a little bit about how emotions over take cognition.
And we decided to test this in as many, many ways that you can think about testing
it. You can think about testing it when people
are hungry or afraid or thirsty, or people are curious.
Where something around the world, either our internal physiology, or something
external, is influencing our emotions. Our emotion system starts working and we
can say how much they take over. We decide to do it with sexual arousal.
And the reason we decide to do it with sexual arousal is that sexual arousal is
incredibly basic to the human experience, people have lots of experience with it,
and, and it's also, a consequence for many important decisions on life.
We have crimes of passion, we have advertising using sex.
So it's really around us in a big, a big way.
[inaudible]. >> Viewer discretion is advised.
In the upcoming clip, you will be exposed to potentially explicit descriptions of
sexual behavior, risk taking, immoral acts, and the surprising tendency of
mankind to shift priorities when sexually aroused.
If you are sensitive to a conversation and imagery of a sexual nature, you may not
want to watch this clip. [inaudible].
So we wanted to understand how is the emotional state of being aroused
influencing people's decision making. So, to do that we looked at three
behaviors. We looked at, we looked at preferences for
sexual behaviors, what kind of sexual behaviors would people like to engage in
or not. We looked at willingness to take a risk,
mostly the sexual domain wearing condoms and so on.
And we finally looked at the willingness of men to engage in morally dubious type
behaviors. What, to what extent were they willing to
lie and exaggerate in order to get women to go into bed with them.
And the procedure, basically, was very simple.
We had what we called a cold state, an unemotional state.
This was the control group. In that control group, people sat in front
of a laptop and answered questions. And the questions were about, how likely
are you to be interested in engaging in all kinds of sexual activities.
Ranging from kissing to having sex with somebody you hated, to things that are
kind of on the outskirts of quirkiness. Things that were you, are not part of what
we think of as standard sex, like contacts with animals and urination and other
things. So, with the whole range of sexual
practices and we ask people, when you're sexually aroused, how likely are you to be
interested in engaging in all of those things.
And people answered those questions. Then the second question was about risk
taking. We asked questions about condom use.
If, if you went into a room with a girl at night and you were both halfly undressed
and all of a sudden you realized you don't have a condom.
Would you stop things and go to a pharmacy to get the condom or would you continue
having sex without a condom. We asked lots of questions like that.
And finally we asked questions about immoral activities.
And we asked, to what extent would you go as a man, to what extent would you go to
try get women to have sex with you. Would you buy them a drink?
Would you try and get them drunk? Would you give them drugs?
Would you tell them you love them even if they don't, if you, if you, if you don't,
would you try and coerce them physically and so on?
So, we had the whole range of these activities.
So, as I told you, we had the cold condition.
We had the condition which people just sat there and answer the question.
And base on those answers, you would say that people would, eh, not interested in
any of our quirky sexual behaviors. They were always going to wear condoms and
they were not going to be deceitful and egregiously unethical to women.
Eh, when they were trying to get them to have sex with them.
So, people look quite fantastic in that regard.
But then we took the same men and sometimes different men and we gave them
the same computer interface. But before they started answering, some
pictures of nudity came about. We asked the group of undergraduate
students to pick the kind of pornography that other students would like.
And these pictures started appearing. And in addition to that, we asked them to
self stimulate. We gave them instructions of sit in you
room alone, get a towel, as the picture start appearing start stimulating yourself
with one hand and put the computer such that you can operate with only one, one
hand. And then, as we're going through this
self-stimulation process. We asked them to indicate how aroused they
were. And once the arousal reached a level of
about 75, 80% of the total arousal possible.
Between not aroused at all, to coming. Once it arrived that level, we asked them
to try to maintain that level of arousal, and the questions start to pop again.
So, now the questions popped out and they were asked, how would you behave when you
arouse? But now they were also aroused.
So think about it. Both groups were asked to predict how they
would behave. What sexual activities would they enjoy,
condom use, and misbehavior to women? How do we behave when aroused?
But the first group were not aroused, the second group aroused.
And again we have to remember that undergrads experience arousal quite
quickly, quite often. So, this is not something that they do not
have experience with. It's something they have experience with.
But nevertheless, they were dramatic differences.
In terms of the preferences the people who were aroused found everything more
exciting. Legal and illegal.
Everything, every possible activity was much more exciting.
In terms of safe behavior, people who are aroused, were not as interested in getting
condoms and acting safe in a sexual way. And finally, in terms of misbehaving, so
with women in ethical way the people who were in a cold state said I would never do
any of those, people in a hot state said, yes I could easily see myself doing that.
So, what we have here is that despite this being a common experience, when we have to
predict how would we behave when we are aroused, we don't predict it quite well.
And we're aroused, all of a sudden, we change.
We change as human beings. All of a sudden, what we want and what we
don't want is not the same. We look differently at the future, we look
differently at risk, we look differently at morality.
In essence, our desire takes over. Our thinking goes away.
But not only did, does that happen, but we also mispredict the extent this would
happen. So, this suggests for example, that if you
think to yourself oh, I'll go to a party and then if I ever get sexually aroused, I
will go and get a condom. You're doing that in a state in which
you're cold, in which you're unaroused. What are the odds that when you actually
get to that state, this will be the state of your mind and your set of preferences?
Very unlikely. So, in fact we have to understand how we
become different people when we get aroused and how we need to account for
that, how we need to make sure that our behaviors are consistent with that.
So you can either think about maybe you don't want to get to a state of arousal,
or maybe you have to recognize the fact that by the time you get to a state of
arousal, you would be a different person. Maybe you will want to have a condom with
you. By the way, there's a very troubling
result in the US, where you have a lot of young people who are signing all kinds of
pledges to not have sexual relationships and what you find is that the rate of
sexually transmitted disease among this group is actually very high, sometimes
higher than the people who don't take this pledge.
And why? Because the people who are taking the
pledge are also not taking a condom. And they say, oh yes, yes, I can always
resist the urges and I would always behave well.
When they get to, in that situation they can't behave very well.
And if they don't have a condom, this is very they're going to actually act in a
very risky way. This, by the way, I should point out is
not about forgiving people who commit all kinds of crimes of passion.
If you and I sat in a jury and there was somebody who committed some kind of
passion, crime of passion, whether it's sexual or physical or some other approach,
it's true that from our cold state we would not be able to understand their hot
state. And it's true that if they, somehow the
court procedure would get us to experience the hot state, all of a sudden we would
understand better what was causing that person to act to a much higher degree.
But understanding that, to an even higher degree, and understanding how emotion
changes, people doesn't necessarily mean we should just accept it all the time.
People are still responsible for their actions.
But when we design interventions, and we design educational programs and so on, we
need to understand the extent to which emotion changes us and the extent in which
it changes us without us understanding how effective it will be and how big the
difference will be.