So if you think about this issue of what happens when you on an emotional state,
and you're trying to predict how you would feel and how you would behave and what
kind of decision you would make when you're not in an emotional state, we call
this an intra-empathy problem. Because what you're trying to understand
how you would be under an emotional state. Usually when you think about empathy is
about how you understand somebody else but in this case it's about your own state.
So you can think about what happens when you're in an emotional state.
You're angry with somebody and you say to yourself.
How would I behave later when I'm not angry, and you probably mis-predict your
anger, you think that your later self would be as angry.
And the same thing is when you're in the cold stage right now.
You're not hot, you're not aroused and so on.
And you ask yourself, how would I behave later, when I'm aroused or angry, and so
on. And there's lots of examples for that.
Eh, one of them is a, is a beautiful example about movies.
[music] Eh, when you ask people about what movies they think eh, they should watch
eh, people often think that kind of high-class French movies, eh, without
subtitles, and black and white, and maybe things like Schindler's List and so on.
These are good movies that you'd watch in principle.
And sometimes when they have Netflix, they put those movies in the high place in
their queue, because they basically think they should be the kind of people who
watch these movies. But what happen when people basically go
to watch a movie? Now theyre in a different state, its not
in principle, for later, its for now. And what happened is that people end up
renting way too often things like, Rambo. Nothing bad about Rambo but, instead of
renting the things that are good for us in principle, we rent the kind of things that
would fulfill our desires tonight and these are often much simpler.
Movies in, languages we understand. Not so black and white.
And not so high, high, class movies. Another example is another experiment by
George Lowenson and his colleagues. And in this experiment, they got people,
in the gym, to figure out how important our water related causes in the world?
Right. How much money would you give?
How much effort, would join a charity dinner?
Would you donate your time, your money into those charities?
And they basically got people either when they just started exercising, so they were
not very thirsty. Or they waited awhile and they got them
when they were thirsty. And what happened, the moment people
became thirsty, all of a sudden they had higher empathy with other people who might
be thirsty as well and were willing to contribute more money, more time, they
thought the charities were more important. Now, when you became more thirsty.
Food-related causes did not become more interesting for you.
Just water-related causes. Now, if you think about it, there's a
question of, how do you create a charity dinner?
Many charity dinners, you bring people in, they eat well, they drink well, and then
somebody comes on stage and tries to ask them for money, tell them what a good
charity it is. I think a much better approach is not to
give them any food and not to given them any drinks.
In fact you want to tell them in advance to come prepared for a wonderful meal, and
maybe not to eat the whole day. Then you get them to sit there and the
smells from the kitchen to come in. And they have plates and forks and so on
but the food is not there yet. And now you tell them how important it is.
And now you get them to have higher empathy to these causes, what it feels
like to be hungry and thirsty and so on. And my prediction is that now they will
give much more money.