Stepping Out of the Shadows

21:43The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky once conducted an influential study on the effects of framing. Can you describe the study for me and what it found? Kahneman and Tversky conducted early work showing that seemingly trivial changes in wording could produce really striking changes in people's preferences. So in their 1981 research, they told participants, imagine that there's been an outbreak of an unusual disease and 600 lives are at stake. And then they randomly assigned people in their study to one of two groups. For the first group, they went on to describe some possible response options in terms of how many lives would be saved.

22:26If you go in this direction, this many lives would be saved. If you go in this with this response instead, that many lives will be saved. For the second group, they described those same options in terms of how many lives would be lost. So, for example, out of 600 lives, you're thinking in one case about the 400 that will be saved, or in the other case, the 200 that will be lost. What Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found was that simply framing outcomes in positive or negative terms dramatically altered people's preferences. When choices were framed in terms of lives saved, people tended to avoid risk.

23:05When those same choices were framed in terms of lives lost, people became more willing to gamble.

23:14I asked Alison to tell me about other work that also looks at how we describe the successes or failures of groups, and how we then come to see those groups. So in one of these studies, professionals were asked to evaluate a work team. based on some information about that team's past performance. Half of the participants in the study, randomly assigned, were told that 30 out of 50 of the team's past projects had been successful. The other half of the participants were told that 20 out of 50 of the team's past projects had been unsuccessful. So mathematically, it's the same identical information, right?

23:53But some participants were focused on the part of the glass that was full. Some participants were focused on the part of the glass that was empty. And then the question was, do you fund the work team? Like, how likely are they to succeed? And participants wanted to fund the team more when its past performance had been described in terms of successes than when its past performance had been described in terms of failure.

24:23I understand the same phenomenon is sometimes at work in medical settings when patients are deciding whether to go forward with a surgery. How the surgery is described can change whether we decide it's a good idea or a bad idea. Right. So imagine I tell you a national panel is evaluating a recently developed surgical procedure that involves new robotic technology. And a three-year study on the procedure just concluded, based on the data, experts agree that it has a survival rate of 70%. Or, I tell you, it has a mortality rate of 30%. Same information again. But participants in a study like this are much more favorable towards the procedure when it's described in terms of the survival rate than when it's described in terms of the mortality rate.

25:15Now, on its surface, these framing effects might not seem like they are about the negativity bias, or at least they are not about the negativity bias alone. When you tell people the surgical procedure has a 70 % survival rate, people do focus on that positive news. But here is how the negativity bias kicks in. Allison has run studies where people are presented either the positive or the negative information. Then she presents people with the other side of the coin. The people who got the positive framing first now get the negative framing. The people who got the negative framing about the mortality rate of the procedure are now presented the same information with the positive framing, the survival rate.

25:59In our research, we start out the same way that all these framing studies have in the past. Half Half the participants see a person, a politician, an event, a surgical procedure framed in positive terms. Half of them see that same thing framed in negative terms. But unlike in past research, we don't stop there. We keep going. So people in our studies who see, let's say, a surgical procedure framed in terms of its survival rate at time one, then see it reframed in terms of its mortality rate at time two. People who originally see the surgical procedure framed in terms of its mortality rate, then later see it reframed in terms of its survival rate.

26:46And our question is, can people just follow along with this as the vast literature on framing seemed to suggest, right? People just react to the frame that's right in front of them. I like the half-full glass. I dislike the half-empty glass. So maybe I can bounce back and forth easily between them. But that's not what we found, or it's only what we find half the time. When people see a positive frame first, and then it switches to a negative frame, survival rate switches to mortality rate, they follow right along. They like the procedure at first. When you reframe it, they don't like it anymore.

27:24But when we move in the opposite direction, when we start out with negatives and reframe as positives, participants tend to get stuck in the initial negative framing. They don't like the procedure when it's described in terms of mortality. And then when we say, hey, you can think of this in terms of survival rate, they still don't like it.

27:50So in other words, if you tell me the procedure has a 70 % survival rate and I like it, but then you tell me it has a 30 % mortality rate, I changed my mind and I now stop liking it. But if you start out telling me it has a 30 % mortality rate, I don't like it. And now if you tell me it has a 70 % survival rate, I still don't like it. Yes, that initial negative frame seems to stick in your head and resist subsequent attempts to change it.

28:23What does this tell you that in some ways things seem to drift almost toward the negative side of the equation? I think that our brains have a tendency to tilt towards the negative, right? That just fundamental negativity bias that our minds look for negative information and then hold on to it once we find it. And I think this is one way that our brains do that, that our brains are holding on to the initial conceptualization of something as negative. And it's really hard to switch things around and start thinking of it as positive.

29:12When you see these framing effects and you see that we tend to go from a positive frame to a negative frame fairly easily, but not so easily from a negative frame to a positive frame, do you have any understanding of how this is actually happening in the brain, Allison? Yeah, so this was a question that we were really curious about, and we've looked at it in a few different ways. But probably my favorite is that we gave people a very simple math problem. We told them, imagine there's been an outbreak of an unusual disease and 600 lives are at stake. So that classic Kahneman and Tversky framing study.

29:48And then we just asked them, if 100 lives are saved, how many will be lost? Or if 100 lives are lost, how many will be saved? So everyone just has to calculate 600 minus 100 and come up with the answer of 500. But whereas some people have to convert from positives to negatives to get that answer, the second group, the other people have to convert from negatives to positives. Can you unpack that last part just a little bit more? Sure. So some people, to solve the problem of 600 minus 100, have to convert from lives saved to lives lost, right? If 100 lives are saved, how many will be lost? Other people are doing the same math problem, but they're calculating if 100 lives are lost, how many will be saved?

30:38And then we timed how long it took them to solve the problem. Everyone can do it in a few seconds, but it takes people significantly longer when the math problem involves converting from negatives to positives than when it involves converting from positives to negatives. So it's almost as if you have, you know, if the brain was a freeway system or a road system, then the negativity information flows on the highways and the positivity information flows on the back streets. I love that analogy. Yeah.

31:17Our minds tend to focus on things that are threatening or distressing. Often, what this means is that we walk around with an excessively negative view of our lives and the world. But there are ways to manage our tendency to focus on the negative and even ways to turn this bias to our advantage. When we come back, rebalancing bad with good. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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32:59This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Can you think of a time in your life when something negative crowded out all the positive things? Did this have consequences for the way you behaved and the opportunities you were able to see? If you have a personal story you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org using the subject line negative. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org.

33:39Alison Ledgerwood is a psychologist at the University of California, Davis. She studies the tendency of the brain to focus on the negative and how different frames can change the way we see events in a positive light or a negative light. Now, Alison, as we've discussed, the goal here is not to eliminate our tendency to focus on the negative. It can be real value and benefit in noticing things that are dangerous or threatening or wrong. However, it is the case that the bias that we have toward the negative causes many of us to walk around feeling like our lives are much worse than they actually are.

34:14You say one way to combat this problem is to make an effort to notice things about our lives that are positive? You know, what I take away from this research for my own life, in part, is that our brains have this fundamental tendency to tilt toward the negative. But exactly as you say, it doesn't work to suppress negativity. In fact, there's plenty of research showing that when you try to suppress negative emotions, it makes the negativity rebound stronger than ever. So we have to acknowledge the negatives. And as you pointed out, we can often use that to our advantage to work to change problems in our environment.

34:52But we can also try to help even out our brains, try to make it a little bit easier for our brains to also notice the positives. And we can just do that through practice, the same way that we learn any kind of cognitive or behavioral habit, right? Think about the first time you're driving in a new route to work. You have to pay a lot of attention. It's kind of hard. Maybe you make a wrong turn. But the 73rd time you are driving or walking or biking that same route, you can just do it automatically. It's easy. So the same thing happens with a new way of thinking as a new way of behaving, we can practice thinking of positives and use that to not counteract or replace, but to complement our brain's strength of focusing on negatives.

35:48I understand that your colleague Robert Emmons has found that we can spend just a couple minutes every day, and that can help us retrieve the positive things in our lives? Yeah. So in his research, he had participants write for just a few minutes a day about things that they felt grateful or thankful for and found that it substantially boosted their well-being over the course of the study. There's other research by my colleague, Tomika Yunida, showing that sharing positives with other people can have a real boost for your health. So she looked at older couples sharing positive emotions during their day or having those positive emotions on their own.

36:32And she found that when they shared the positive emotions, that was uniquely good for health. It lowered their cortisol and actually had a lasting effect throughout the day. Talk about why this might happen, Alison. Why is it important for us to express our positive emotions, not just feel them? I think that when we express emotions to other people, part of what happens is that we're creating a shared reality about them, right? We are not just experiencing them by ourselves, but experiencing them with other people, and that can make them feel more real.

37:13And I think it's also the case that sometimes as we go through our lives, you know, we take the people around us a bit for granted and we feel like, you know, I can tell them all the negative things that are happening, all the things that I'm unhappy about in my life, and we forget to tell them about things that are positive that are going on in our lives. And of course, that's not a good way to spread positivity or to increase the net positivity in the relationship. Yes, and there's actually research showing that capitalizing, that's what researchers call it, so celebrating positives with friends and people who are close to us is also very important.

37:50So we think about like our friends are so important for supporting us when something goes wrong, but it's also really important that we have people around us who can get excited for us when things go well.

38:11I'm wondering whether you follow this advice yourself. Do you take a couple of minutes every day to write down the great things that are happening in your life or to share positive things that are happening with other people, Alison? As with probably everyone, I'm much better at giving advice than following it myself. But I have tried at various points in my life to do the gratitude journaling and sharing positives with other people. So there was one period of time that I was feeling just really down about everything and realized that I was looking on the negative side of things very habitually.

38:52And I decided to try writing for a few minutes every evening about things that were positive, things that I appreciated, that I felt grateful for. And at first, it was very difficult. I would just stare at this blank sheet of paper for like three minutes or however long I set the timer on my phone. And then the timer would ring and I would be all grumpy and I'd write down dog, right? I guess. As in you're grateful for your dog? That was the one thing you could think of? Yeah, it was the one, but it wasn't accompanied. I want to be clear. It was not accompanied by like feelings of gratitude. I was mad at myself for making myself do the task.

39:31And I was basically saying like, technically, my dog's not bad, I guess. And after a few days of that, it was definitely multiple days, right? I think I thought of a second example and started feeling slightly more appreciative of the dog. I mean, the dog was great throughout, right? The dog's a dog. The dog is happy to see me. The dog's lovely. It's not her fault. But I started thinking like, oh, the dog and the way the dog smiles when I come home. And then a few days after that, it starts getting even easier. And I have maybe several sentences of things that I feel appreciation for. And then what I noticed over the course of a couple of weeks is that I started thinking of those little things during the day, not just when I sat down in the evening to do it intentionally.

40:19right? But it had become a more habitual style of thinking.

40:28So in some ways, you're starting to notice things because in some ways, you're making yourself notice things. Right. It starts out intentional. It starts out, I'm walking in a new way to work and I have to pay attention and turn right on this street and think of how my dog is actually a positive thing in my life. And then with practice, it gets easier. With practice, it becomes almost effortless and automatic in other parts of your day.

40:59Now, please tell me that you have thought positive thoughts, not just about your dog, but there are other things in your life that you also think are positive. This is true. There are other things in my life that I also think are positive. It reminds me, Alison, that the way you're describing this, this feels so much like the way exercise works. You know, the first day we do it, we're groaning and we're just really reluctant and we're like, do I have to do this? And you don't like doing this and you don't do very much of it. But of course, if you do it for a week and you do it for two weeks and you do it for a month, it starts to get progressively easier.

41:33And then you start to find new things that you'd like to do, new forms of exercise, and they just sort of build on one another. Yes. So you're exercising a new thought pattern instead of like a physical muscle. And as you do it, it gets easier and easier.

41:57So Alison, I understand that people in your life sometimes point out that you don't always practice what you preach in terms of focusing on the positive. plenty of people call me out when i am when i am hypocritical about something which i appreciate very much um my partner actually had this lovely practice when we first got together of celebrating successes when right we're both academics so this is probably not unique to academia, but we're both academics and every success that we have is partial, is a little step towards the ultimate goal. You don't get a paper accepted. You write the paper and you submit it and then it gets rejected and then you revise it and you submit it again.

42:49And then you get requests for revision and then you make the revision, right? It's this long process. My partner had this delightful habit when we got together of celebrating each stage in the process, each time you take a little step towards your goal, with a special dinner. So I submitted the paper, I get a special dinner. I submitted a revision of the paper, I get a special dinner. I got feedback, I get a special dinner. And we've adopted this together because it both helps keep your attention on the positive, right? Instead of it getting lost in your day, because annoyingly, we never get to have a day that's just one success and nothing else happens, right?

43:35There's always something. So if you return to it in the evening, then it helps kind of pull that part of your day out for you and highlight it. And once again, you're sharing it with somebody else. So you're creating this shared reality about it and celebrating it together. Another approach you advise people to take is to engage in what you call gain framing. What is gain framing, Alison? Gain framing is just what we've been calling positive framing. so um one thing i like to do is when i make a mistake it usually feels bad i perseverate on it i think of all the things i wish had happened so that i wouldn't have made the mistake but then if i can reframe the mistake in my mind as a learning opportunity it doesn't get rid of all the bad feelings right but it focuses my attention on okay what can i do differently next time.

44:33And I'm kind of putting that energy into creating a new plan for the future. Alison, you have a co-author, a political scientist with whom you have collaborated on a number of projects. And at one point recently, the two of you felt like you had become participants in your own research. Tell me what happened. So my colleague, Amber Boydston, here in the political science department at UC Davis, was working with me on just starting this research, and we applied for a grant to fund it. So we write the grant proposal, which is long and hard. We submit it. We wait for months and months to hear back.

45:12And finally, one day, we get an email back with a decision. So we hold our breath and cross all our fingers and toes and anything else we can find, and we open it up, and it says, our grant has been funded. And we get maybe two seconds of unadulterated joy until we read the next sentence, which says, unfortunately, we had to cut your funding by half. And we were so disappointed that we lost half of our funding. And we're just sitting there feeling so bad about it. And then we go, wait, wait, but we got half of our funding. Wait, are we participants in our own study here? Yeah, because the pleasure of having the grant was stolen almost immediately by the fact that the grant was not what you expected.

46:01But of course, it hasn't stolen the entire pleasure, or at least it shouldn't. It shouldn't at all. We were still able to do a large portion of the research with the half of the grant that we got. And two minutes before that, right, we hadn't had a grant at all. So we almost literally got a half full glass, but immediately focused on the part that was empty. That makes me think about one thing that I think happens to a lot of people, which is that when good things happen to us, we tend to absorb them fairly quickly. And then they become part of the background. They become part of the wallpaper, if you will.

46:36And so, you know, a second before you open this, the news to discover that you got the grant, you would have given a lot to know that you got the grant. It would have made you so happy. But the moment you know that you got the grant, that sort of slips away into the background and everything else, including the fact that the grant was cut in half, that comes into the foreground. Yes. And, you know, there's this really interesting research on how easily we adapt to our current circumstances. So we level set to whatever the current reality is, the current status quo. And I think this is one of those cases where we can adapt very quickly to a positive and maybe not quite so quickly to a negative.

47:26You recently had an experience where you made an effort to celebrate the positive. I understand it made a real difference. Can you tell me what happened? so in our house we put everyone's successes on the fridge so that we can celebrate each other's positives and feel better about them ourselves so a couple weeks ago my kid got an award at school and of course that goes on the fridge i guess that's pretty normal to put it on the fridge but we also try to notice it and mention it to each other when we walk by and in our house grown-up successes go up on the fridge too so that when i have a success or when my partner has a success that goes up there too.

48:04And so for example, my partner comes home yesterday. So he has written a book on relationships that's coming out soon. And yesterday he came home from recording the audio book. And he tells me that the director there said that it was one of the best readings he had ever heard. And then my partner turns away to go on with his day and do the other 63 things that he has to do. Right. And I'm like, no, stop. First of all, that's amazing. That's an amazing thing for somebody to tell you. And second, go write that down right now. Print it out. We're putting it up on the fridge and we're going to talk about it every time I walk by.

48:54Let's talk a moment about the role that we play in bringing positivity or negativity into the lives of other people, Alison. Very often, I think, when someone is rude to us, when we are having a bad day, we may have a tendency to pass on this negativity to others. So in some ways, negativity begets more negativity. Are there ways to interrupt this cascade? I think so. Every now and then, I manage to do this in the middle of a fight with my partner or my kid, I see a way to be silly or make a joke. And then suddenly we can laugh together instead of being stuck in this negative spiral. So a few weeks ago, we were having a family dinner and we had just washed the tablecloth and my kid kept spilling little things on the table.

49:43She'd spill like a little bit of a sauce or one noodle, right? And my partner and I would rush to clean it up. And we're all getting kind of more and more stressed about trying to keep a tablecloth clean so that we don't have to do laundry again. And suddenly, I just had this impulse. So I picked up a big handful of what we were having for dinner, and I just slapped it down on the tablecloth. So there's this huge mess everywhere. And I'm like, I guess we're doing laundry. And we all get to laugh about it, right? Instead of being kind of sniping at each other and stuck in this negative space. Yeah.

50:19I think it's sometimes hard when people treat us badly, when we are the recipients of negativity, to respond with something that is not negativity. You know, psychologists have long talked about the norm of reciprocity. You know, we are kind when we're treated kindly. We are rude when we're treated rudely. But really, I think what you're pointing to or what you're recommending is that we are kind when we're treated rudely. That's not easy to do. It's not easy at all. And to be clear, I usually don't. But I think we can try, right? And then every now and then there's this little window of opportunity that we get to interrupt that negative cycle.

51:02I'm wondering after having done all of this work on the negativity bias, do you feel like you yourself are able to be less negative as you go through your life, Alison?

51:15I think the answer to that probably depends on the day some days I'm doing it pretty well and some days I'm not and that's okay but really what helps me is to think about these two pieces together there's what is the negative focus telling me How can I use anger or negativity to fuel me? I try to think about bad mood as information. It's a messenger. It's saying something is wrong. And then also, how can I balance out that negativity with some positives in my own life?

52:11Rebalancing negative emotions with positive emotions can be powerful. Paying attention to the good things in our lives can help us remember what we have stopped noticing. It can remind us that there are silver linings to life's problems. But there are certain situations where the intensity of a negative emotion can make it very hard to see anything positive. The dark cloud hides the silver lining. Let me tell you a story we received from a listener named Chris. Chris used to spend her days working in one of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring places in the world. I used to work as a river guide in the Grand Canyon for a long time.

52:52And we used to do kind of team building, group building, fun things all day long. After plying the waters of the canyon all day, the group would gather around the campfire for one last bonding activity before they went to sleep. As the stars twinkled above them in the inky night sky, We would floss our teeth together. They would floss their teeth together. And that's not all. Perhaps you're picturing 20 people standing around and simultaneously flossing their teeth. Uh-uh. That's not what happened. I mean, everybody, you can have up to 20 people flossing their teeth with the same piece of dental floss.

53:40The same piece of dental floss. Now, before you lose your lunch or call the dental police on Chris, there's an asterisk that makes the story less unsettling. Slightly less unsettling. I don't mean everybody sharing that from one person to the next, but you take a new spool of dental floss and stretch it out as far as it will go. So you each get your own clean, untouched little section, but everybody's flossing with the same piece at the same time. So imagine a long string of floss, maybe 30 feet long. Your section of the dental floss is clean and unspoiled. You can see that. But inches from you is someone else pulling on the same string, getting inside their gums.

54:21Would you grab your piece of string and floss away with gusto? When I think about that now, or when I tell somebody else about that now, they are disgusted, even though you know that nobody else has touched your piece of dental floss. It's pretty funny how it's clean, but it's still disgusting.

54:44I'm guessing that if you find the story disgusting, thinking about all the beautiful stars in the night sky over the Grand Canyon will not help. In the early days of Hidden Brain, I often described myself as a card-carrying rationalist. Since then, however, I've learned the endless ways in which humans can be anything but rational. Our visceral response to things we perceive as disgusting is a prime example. Logic and our own eyes may tell us that something is safe and clean, but our emotions can tell us a very different story. When we come back, remarkable stories of revulsion. We'll delve into the icky and endlessly fascinating science of disgust.

55:27You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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56:53This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. What do you find disgusting? Cockroaches? Moldy food? Your kids' stinky gym socks? We each have our own lists of things that revolt us and our own internal barometers for how easily we are disgusted by things that are rotten, smelly, or diseased. That's part of what makes disgust so fascinating. It's driven by a combination of emotions, reflexes, and cultural cues.

57:28We recently talked about all this with David Pizarro. He's a psychologist at Cornell University, and he joined us for an episode titled, Yuck! The Science of Disgust. Listeners had many stories and questions that they shared in response to that conversation, and David returns to the show today to discuss them. David Pizarro, welcome back to Hidden Brain. Thank you. Thank you for having me again. David, one of the striking things about disgust is that it spreads. It contaminates other things. The fly that is sitting on the slice of toast makes the toast inedible. Why do disgusting things seem to infect other things?

58:09It's a great question, and it's often been observed about disgust that one fly on your toast ruins the toast, but one piece of toast on a group of flies does not somehow cleanse the flies. And the thought is that because disgust, it is widely believed, is an emotion that evolved to keep us from getting sick long before humans had any sort of germ theory of disease, disgust nonetheless was tracking contagion. And so disgust seems to be the one emotion that works via this kind of contagion process. Many listeners wanted to learn more about why some of us tolerate things better than others. Here's Veronica from Michigan.

58:55Please, tell me more about why I'm able to go pick up roadkill on the side of the road and complete weirdo things like taxidermy projects or bone articulation projects, whereas my peers just sort of recoil in horror and probably judgment when I tell them about this hobby. Thanks so much. So, David, is there something special about people like Veronica? Well, there is something different about people like Veronica, but there might be one of two things that's different. Veronica might be overall less likely to be disgusted in general at a whole bunch of different things. Or Veronica might have gotten used to specifically those projects that she referred to.

59:41So we can get used to doing things. Anybody who's had to clean toilets knows that it might be the grossest thing you do the first time you do it, but after a while, you just have to get used to it. And so we can develop very domain-specific adaptation to disgust. But Veronica might be one of those people who is just on that end of the distribution, who just isn't bothered in general by lots of disgusting things. Hmm. We talked in our earlier discussion about how love and lust can temporarily mute our disgust responses. So you might find another child's soil diaper disgusting, but you don't find your own baby's soil diaper disgusting.

1:00:22You might not want to share someone's dental floss, but you're willing to lock your mouth on someone else's mouth if you're in love. Why is this, David? it? Well, you know, this is speculation. Whenever we talk about evolved mechanisms, we can't go back in evolutionary time and look. But it is thought that if there is one time where it is important to not feel too much disgust at what you're doing, it would be during that time when we engage in reproductive activities. Because as I say sometimes to my students, if you thought about what you were doing in the moment, you probably wouldn't want to do it.

1:00:58And And so it's important to be able to turn off that little switch. And I think that the same goes for having to take care of people we love. We received an interesting question from listener Lori about people who are more sensitive to disgust. I just listened to your episode on disgust and I found it really interesting and couldn't help but maybe compare those who display disgust to also being individuals that demonstrate high preferences on everything from toilet paper to how a spouse is. house looks or beyond. So yeah, I was interested to know if there is a correlation and what that might be.

1:01:54I appreciate your show so much. What do you think, David? Is there any research showing that people who are highly sensitive to disgust are also more particular or even more controlling in other dimensions of their lives? It's a great question that Laurie asks, And the answer is a little bit unclear. And I'll say why. It depends on what kind of disgust you're talking about. So some people do distinguish between moral disgust, sexual disgust, or what they call pathogen disgust, the thing that I've been talking about the most, the thing that keeps you away from disease. And when you look at other personality traits, it seems as if there is not a whole lot of correlation between the tendency to feel grossed out in the pathogen-discussed way and personality traits that might be similar to controllingness.

1:02:51there is a little bit of an effect such that people who are high in Machiavellianism, which is a trait that you might consider an extreme form of controlling, that is a desire to control others for your own gain, and that actually shows a negative, although small, correlation with disgust. And so there's not a whole lot that is, I would say, is demonstrating a strong relationship between disgust sensitivity and some of these other personality variables. And when you say there's an inverse correlation between Machiavellianism and disgust, you're saying that people who are low in disgust are high in Machiavellian tendencies?

1:03:37That's right. That's right. Or people, yes, you could say people who are easily disgusted are less likely to be Machiavellian. We talked in our earlier conversation about the role of smell in eliciting feelings of disgust. Listener Emily had a question about a different sense and its impact on our experience of disgust. Apropos of your show on disgust, I would like to pose the question of visual disgust, not just smell, but there's sometimes when I see patterns of repeated shapes. It could be a bunch of pebbles or a way things are put together, but more often it resembles like a swarm, a swarm of bugs.

1:04:24I just feel such a visceral sense of repulsion that I could throw up. Any comments about that? That is a great question, Emily. There are quite a few people who report the kind of disgust reaction that you're reporting. In fact, it has a name, trypophobia. Trypophobia is a disgust response to small holes, patterns, bumps that occur sort of in a regular pattern, as Emily was describing. And it seems as if maybe there is an evolutionary explanation for why we might have them. because there's an association between those kinds of patterns and maybe some diseases that are visible on the skin. But that is speculation.

1:05:19But I want to tell Emily that she's definitely not alone, and she definitely should not Google the word trypophobia.

1:05:28It strikes me as you're describing this, David, that it might be that it's not just that we differ from other people when it comes to disgust. It also might be that each of us has different sensitivities when it comes to our different senses. So some of us might be more prone to disgust that comes to us through our noses, and others might be more disgusted by something that we touch. I think that's exactly right. And there is some research showing that women have a lower threshold for olfactory stimuli that might make them disgusted. And there are ways to measure that threshold. You give people sort of increasing doses of a smell and you can chart them to see where they are on how sensitive they are to smells.

1:06:16And it seems as if women have a particular sensitivity to disgust smells. There's another thing that's very interesting about smell specifically as compared to vision. Smell is one of the senses that has a much more direct path to our emotions. It sort of bypasses a lot of the areas of the brain that other sensory inputs get processed through. And that's why some people will report that they get an immediate sense of nostalgia when they smell something or they're transported to a memory of an old girlfriend or boyfriend when they smell a perfume or cologne. And disgust is very strong in that olfactory sense as well.

1:07:02The sight of feces does not do as good a job as the smell of feces in inducing disgust. Listener Lisa sent us a question highlighting how we can often have a different bar for what we consider disgusting based on whether it's us or someone else doing the thing in question. I wonder why when I do certain personal things like lick icing off my finger, it's fine. But when another family member does it, I find it extremely disgusting. So just thought I'd throw that into the hopper for your consideration. So it seems like our capacity for disgust has a great deal of hypocrisy woven into it, David.

1:07:52Yes, I think Lisa has discovered this very, very deep part of human psychology, which is when other people do things, it's worse than when we do them. There are things that are not disgusting because it is us. It is part of us. our bodily fluids, our bodily processes. Another thing is that you can't see yourself doing it. Maybe if Lisa were to watch herself, if someone took a video of her licking her ice cream in a weird way, she would feel disgust for that. But when it's you doing it, then you're not likely to feel that disgust. Because imagine, Shankar, how much disgust we would feel if we were constantly disgusted by the things that we do.

1:08:35Yeah, we would be paralyzed by disgust. Yes.

1:08:46When we come back, the social dimensions of disgust. What we're signaling when we express disgust to another person. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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1:10:07Grab tasty flatbreads and their new balsamic chicken salad in the prepared foods department. Keep things fresh with organic red cherries, strawberries, and peaches at their peak. And stock up on bug sprays and sun care must-haves. Make your summer sizzle at Whole Foods Market. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Cornell University, David Pizarro studies the science of disgust. He returns to the show today for our recurring segment, Your Questions Answered. What we find disgusting can be shaped by where we live. It's also shaped by the moment in which we live. We received an email about that from listener Mary, who writes, People used to use the same toothpicks and pass it around the table after eating in the 1800s, or just dumping waste right into the streets back in the Middle Ages?

1:11:02Is our disgust ever evolving? What do you think of Mary's question, David? I think Mary makes a very good point, which is it's important to understand that social context influences all of our emotions and disgust is included in that. There are customs, there are ways of behaving that in one time and place might seem very disgusting and another one don't. Sometimes that's out of sheer necessity. We didn't always have the ability to have very clean bathrooms that we could use every day. And so, as you mentioned earlier, we might burn out if we had to consistently feel disgust for just something that was a part of life.

1:11:50But social context does shape everything. And it's easy to lose sight of that when we talk about an emotion that seems so strong and to have such a strong evolutionary basis for it. We often point to the similarities and how strong some of these disgust elicitors are across cultures. But the reality is what you find disgusting and what I find disgusting is going to be some sort of result of our upbringing, our culture, our personal habits and our individual sensitivity to disgusting things. Is it possible, David, that you think we're living in a particularly disgust-sensitive time right now? I suspect that we are.

1:12:39I don't have any direct data on whether or not people have been getting more disgust-sensitive, and I'm certain this would vary across the world. in the United States in this time and place, it's very easy to go around not feeling disgusted because there are so many efforts made for cleanliness. There are billions and billions of dollars spent on cleaning products. We do not want to see disgusting things in our homes. We get rid of them easily. I think it's easier than ever to live an antiseptic life. Hmm. We talked in our earlier discussion about how disgust has often been used to tarnish women in public life and in politics.

1:13:25Remind me of some of that history, David. The rhetoric of disgust is one of those very ugly pieces of human history, but it's strong. And so what you see very clearly is that certain groups are often tagged with the emotion of discussed, usually by pointing out something about them that is perceived to be disgusting, or people are trying to persuade others that they're disgusting. And so you get comments about Hillary going to the bathroom or menstruating. That's always been something that in the hands of men is low-hanging fruit to try to make women seem inferior. In fact, if you look at some of the earliest codes that we have from old civilizations, a menstruating woman is a woman who had to be separated from the camp.

1:14:26And so in particular, women's dirt, women's bodily fluid, the disgusting aspects of one gender have been used against them in a very powerful way. Hmm. Listener, Alon had a very interesting question about the relationship between disgust and gender stereotypes. Once when I was a boy, I saw a group of other boys playing with a snail. They dared me to touch it, but I refused because I was grossed out. So they jeered me with statements like, what, are you a girl? Even as an adult, I notice people connecting the concept of masculinity with the bravery to withstand disgust, like eating raw meat, or mud wrestling, or even the movie cliché of a man on a date placing his coat on a puddle so his girlfriend can cross without getting dirty.

1:15:23On the other hand, masculinity is politically associated with conservatism, which itself is associated with strong aversion to disgusting things. How would you explain this paradox? I love this question, David. What do you think? Well, that is a really good question from Milan. I definitely agree about the masculinity. I don't know if this is a cultural universal, but it certainly is part of my experience. there was constant testing of the boundaries of how much you could deal with disgusting things. And it wasn't just disgust, at least in my experience. It was any sort of negative emotion as a man, you were supposed to be able to deal with it.

1:16:07So I remember tests of pain. You brought your friend in and you did something to them, see how long they could last before they complained. And if it was too fast, then they were, you know, wusses or whatever gendered insults you could bring. So I very much think that that is the case. I also think that ironically women in their life end up having to deal with a lot more disgusting things than men ever do. So this is, I believe, largely performance on the part of men. As for the conservative liberal finding, I don't know what to make of this because this is not a gendered finding either. This is both men and women who report being more politically conservative report being more disgust sensitive.

1:16:58So, you know, there are always multiple factors that are going to influence how much disgust any given person feels. And there's going to be something like the culture, the individual difference, the male-female stereotypes, and many other things. We received an email from listener Martin, who's interested in knowing more about the intersection between disgust and religious practices. Martin writes, There was no mention at all of such concepts as original sin and its cleansing through baptism, Holy Communion, and other rites. Nor was any mention made of dietary laws and unclean foods, animals, or objects in Judaism and Islam.

1:17:44Are these concepts based on disgust? So David, I know that you're not a scholar of religion, but what do you make of the role that disgust may play in religious practices and beliefs? Well, I love this question, Martin, because I have been increasingly interested in this aspect of not just disgust, but I would say purity more broadly. In fact, I'm teaching a seminar on this topic, and we've read a lot of literature from religious scholars and clinical psychologists. And there does seem to be this overlap in religious practices in some religions and cleanliness and purity. Sometimes it's metaphorical, like cleansing your soul through confession.

1:18:29Sometimes it's absolutely physical. You must do ablutions before prayer. And I think that it runs deep in our religions. I think that there is a power to purity and to being pure that has sort of metaphorically become associated with being a good person, being closer to God. And so absolutely, there is a link. And I think purity is deeper than disgust. So one of the questions Martin asks is, are these rituals driven by disgust? And they don't need to be. You don't need to be disgusted to wash your feet, you know, or do ablutions or get baptized. But I believe that it is the same underlying mechanism that we all share, which is keeping clean helps keep us disease free.

1:19:31When we come back, listeners share their techniques for quieting disgust. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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1:20:54This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. By its very nature, disgust seems like one of the hardest emotions to control. Our response to things that gross us out can be visceral. But as we've discussed, what we find disgusting can vary from person to person and also across time and culture. If we want to confront our own feelings of disgust, where should we start? Today, we're hearing listener suggestions and talking with psychologist David Pizarro at Cornell University. He studies the science of disgust. David, I'd like to start this conversation with a message we received from a listener named John.

1:21:31He's a minister in North Carolina, and he had an interesting perspective on disgust. As a young pastor, part of my clinical training was to work as a chaplain at Allentown State Mental Hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Many of the situations I had to deal with in that setting evoked horror, revulsion, or disgust. I had to learn to face those feelings and get them under control. Otherwise, they would dominate the interaction and I would have been powerless to help the patient. It's always seemed to me that there are three ways of dealing with strong primitive emotions. One is to conceal them, to simply hide our feelings from others without dealing with them at all.

1:22:18This leaves the emotions driving the bus, we're just hiding it, and we're not being honest about it with ourselves. The other is to control, sort of like the Vunklings in Star Trek, to manhandle the emotions and try not to let them direct our actions. But the best is to confront, to honestly face the primitive emotions, acknowledging them to ourselves and sometimes to others, but also to understand them and set them aside, realizing that they do not represent reality, but simply an unhelpful emotional response. David, I hadn't thought of this before, but if you're a pastor or a counselor who is trying to help others, you have to be able to listen to things that people do with compassion and not turn away in disgust.

1:23:05That's absolutely right. And I think John is making such an important point about how we deal with other humans that might be disgusting to us. And it sounds like John is taking a very compassionate approach. I do not think that it is always the case that these emotions are not in touch with reality. You know, I think we've made the case that disgust is important, it's functional, and sometimes it gives you a signal that you should avoid something. but we have other goals and if one of your goals is to show compassion and mercy to somebody some of the people who are worst off in society people who might not have the ability to bathe regularly or who might be carrying disease it is one of the ultimate signs of I think compassion to be able to go about your business without letting that bother you because from the perspective of the person.

1:24:07They know that others are disgusted by them. And just to feel that somebody isn't showing disgust toward them, I think is an act of true kindness. And there are many stories of religious figures, including Mother Teresa, who would purposefully make a show of handling, touching, hugging, kissing people who would otherwise be viewed as so disgusting by others, as a way to show that compassion can override that disgust. I'm wondering if we're doing work that is mission-driven or something we're deeply passionate about, are we less likely to experience disgust? I mean, we heard from a number of doctors and nurses, for example, who feel that they have a much higher threshold for dealing with disease and injuries that others might find disgusting.

1:24:58Yes, I think that there are two things going on there. One is that people who might not be as easily disgusted go into those kinds of jobs. But that's not the whole story. There is research showing that first year of medical school, pre and post, or right when you get into medical school, your disgust sensitivity levels are pretty much the same as everybody else's. But after that year of having to do things like dissect cadavers, you adapt. And you adapt specifically to human bodies and the kinds of things that you need to deal with as a medical doctor or other medical professional every day. But I do think that you're pointing Shankar to something deeper that intersects with John's question, which is, we talked about love and lust overriding disgust, and it's easy when it's your child to be less grossed out by their diaper.

1:25:56It's easy when it's somebody that you're sexually attracted to. But when it's somebody who is the worst of the worst in society, can you allow compassion to override the reflexive disgust that others feel? And I think this is just the part of discipline that might come from dedicating your life to that sort of thing. Hmm. We've talked on Hidden Brain in the past about the concept of awe and the many benefits it can have for our mental health and outlook. Listener Catherine wrote to talk about how she uses beauty to help her grapple with things that she finds disgusting. I've struggled with disgust sensitivity all of my life and believe it played an important role in a serious eating disorder I developed when I was 12 and a half.

1:26:43In addition to using medication and therapy and other medical treatments, I've learned to use beauty and awe as a way to manage my disgust. When I feel disgusted and I'm triggered, I think back on something I found beautiful, a flower, a waterfall. I'm curious if there's any evidence for this approach and if you have recommendations on other sort of daily habits or mindsets those of us who struggle can use. So Disqus affects us less, and our reactions don't hurt the people around us. What do you think of Catherine's strategy, and do you have any suggestions, David? I think it's a wonderful strategy, and it's quite inspiring, actually, to hear Catherine describe it that way.

1:27:31And I believe that those kinds of strategies are available to us all. She asked for some specifics. There is a strategy of what's called attentional deployment. So just simply shifting your attention from one thing to another so that you're not paying attention to the thing that you find disgusting. I think more effective is reappraisal. So appraising something as different, not thinking about it as the disgusting thing, but rather maybe as having beauty in it, focusing on that. The low-level form of this is when you're a kid and you're watching a gross movie, convince yourself that it's ketchup and not blood.

1:28:14You're reappraising at a low level so that you don't feel disgusted. That's a bit harder when you know the reality of the situation. In fact, interestingly, it's harder for odors than it is for vision. It's hard. But we have a lot of these kinds of strategies for emotion regulation that are available to us. And I think that is part of being a mature adult who's able to effectively regulate these emotions in order to be more effective at dealing with other human beings. and in this case, showing kindness and compassion to other human beings. Whatever works for you, I think, is the good thing to aim for.

1:28:58I mean, I'm thinking about someone who's a nurse or someone who's a doctor, and maybe you're interacting with a patient, and perhaps your immediate visceral response might be disgust. But if you spend a little time, you might say, this person has an interesting history, this person has an interesting story, this person has interesting ideas. And in some ways, what you're reminding yourself of is that the thing that has brought the person into the hospital might not be the entire sum of who that person is. That's a lovely way of saying it. And I think that we often talk about objectification of other humans when talking about sexuality.

1:29:35But there is a way in which we can objectify somebody's physical body in this negative way. And I think what you're pointing to is that these are people with hopes and desires and wishes and dreams, and they are as interesting as anybody else. And opening yourself up to that will be a natural way of shifting your attention, of reappraising the situation. And you know what? We get used to smells. We get used to the sight of disease. All of that we can get accustomed to. But what you can't do is take back the disgust that you demonstrated to somebody who was just there because they needed your help.

1:30:20Hmm. It can sometimes be an alienating experience when you're disgusted by something that most people like. Listener Alison has an interesting hack for getting people to understand where she's coming from when she tells them that she dislikes cheese. A lot of people don't quite understand the extent to which it disgusts me. So a few years back, I started saying, well, just substitute the words dog waste for cheese. As in, you don't even like dog waste on your pizza? What about just a little bit of dog waste cooked in the sauce? Or if I just throw some dog waste into the salad, are you okay picking it out?

1:31:02That dip has dog waste in it, but it's mild. You can barely taste it. They get it now, even if they think I'm a freak. What do you make of Alison's strategy, I love it. I love it. Now, of course, I'm sure that she can't convince people that cheese is disgusting, but at the very least, she can convince them, once you find something disgusting, what is a reasonable way to eat it? And in her case, there is no reasonable way to eat it. I think that is a very, very smart way to fight that fight. In our earlier conversation, David, we talked about how disgust is used in politics to vilify opponents, but it's also used in public health to try and trigger people's disgust about certain behaviors.

1:31:51Listener Garima writes, I wanted to share an example of how Singapore's health minister used disgust for his anti-vaping campaign. The short-form video went mega viral. It speaks the language of Gen Z and channels a very strong emotion to highlight the impact of vaping. Time to spill some tea. This is a healthy lung. And this one is unhealthy. All the white stuff is infected. And when you vape, it may smell like watermelon or lychee, but actually you are taking in very harmful chemical substances. It could include ingredients such as... What do you make of using disgust in public health campaigns, David?

1:32:27it. I think they can be very effective. You and I are probably of a generation that remember pictures of diseased lungs being used to scare us out of smoking. It can be tricky because there is sometimes such a strong disgust that is induced that might even be wrapped up with fear, and what you might get is people simply avoiding the message. And what you don't want to do is let people disengage from the message. But I think there is a sweet spot there, and I think that it's been used quite effectively in hand-washing campaigns for when there are pandemics like the flu. I think it's an emotion that can be harnessed for good in this way.

1:33:22You know, I remember an anti-smoking public health campaign some years ago that used the tagline, kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray. And it reminded me that even though the public health core message, you know, smoking is bad for you, it can give you lung cancer, it can give you emphysema, you would think that those messages would be what people listen to. It's striking that, at least for many young people, the idea that, you know, kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray, that message might end up being more persuasive. Yeah, I think that's right. And that does, I think, hit a sweet spot where the disgust is working, but it's not kicking in the fear that would maybe lead to avoidance.

1:34:03So as a strategy, and in particular, one that is getting at the fears of young people, which is that I might not be attractive to the people I find attractive, I think that could be a strong one. I don't know if anybody ever did this, but one of the things that kept me from smoking was the knowledge that it would give me wrinkles. And I just didn't, I was so vain that I did not want to have wrinkles early on in life. I mean, it's so funny and striking to me that people care more about their appearance and their vanity than about their, you know, their capacity to breathe. I know, and to die. I think it's very hard for us to represent something as a mortal risk, but it's easy to think that we might be ugly today.

1:34:53David Pizarro is a psychologist at Cornell University. David, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you so much. This was great. Thank you, listeners for sending in such wonderful, vivid stories.

1:35:07We also heard today from psychologist Alison Ledgerwood, who studies the negativity bias at the University of California, Davis. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

1:35:37If you love Hidden Brain and want more of the ideas we explore on the show, check out our new YouTube channel. And if you like our videos, please share them with a friend or family member. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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