In short
Negative emotions are “reprogramming” mental states that people struggle to escape because they distort memory, perception, judgment, and even self-image. The episode argues for an “empathy gap” that is mainly intrapersonal: when you’re in one emotional state, you can’t accurately imagine how you’ll feel or behave in another.
Guest background
George Loewenstein, who studies why people misjudge their own emotions; he’s spent his career researching emotion, self-esteem, and decision errors tied to affect. He also ran a “misery survey” with 500+ people and wrote an academic paper titled “Fragile Self-Esteem.”
Key claims
Negative emotions persist longer than positive ones (asymmetry); they create self-fulfilling relationship damage (jealousy, rejection sensitivity); mood-contingent judgment/memory makes bad interpretations stick (e.g., texts/emails); self-esteem is fragile and momentary (sociometer theory); hope can slow adaptation to negative states; venting anger can worsen it (gasoline-on-a-fire analogy).
Notable examples/studies
“Misery survey” stories lasting decades; rejection-sensitive partner study; sarcastic-message misinterpretation; ice-water/cold-room study changing “torture vs enhanced interrogation” judgments; buprenorphine craving vs satiation choice study; “waterboarding isn’t torture” claim reversed after actual waterboarding; “roach in the wine” metaphor for one negative comment outweighing many positives; Antarctica explorer Mike Stroud’s retrospective forgetting of misery; choking under pressure tied to attention (golf swing, high-stakes interviews, public speaking dry mouth); anger friend story involving an email about infidelity.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOUnderstanding Negative Emotions
2:10 to 6:16
Explore how negative emotions affect our thoughts, relationships, and perceptions.
“And the basic idea is when you're in one emotional state, it's almost impossible to imagine how you would feel or behave if you were in a different emotional state.”
The Impact of Rejection Sensitivity
6:16 to 9:08
Learn about rejection sensitivity and its effects on interpersonal relationships.
“There's a category of people who are rejection sensitive.”
Communication and Misinterpretation
9:08 to 11:30
Discover how emotional states influence our interpretation of communication.
“In the modern world where we often communicate by texts and emails, I guess the young generation, it's all texts, no emails.”
Self-Esteem and Aggression
11:30 to 14:00
Understand the link between fragile self-esteem and aggressive behavior.
“When we are in a negative state, there's a phenomenon called mood-contingent judgment and mood-contingent memory also.”
The Nature of Self-Esteem
14:00 to 15:43
Understanding the fluctuating nature of self-esteem through sociometer theory.
“Double tapping on that, I think many of us feel that this idea of self-esteem is more durable than it really is.”
Exploring Positive vs. Negative Emotions
17:45 to 24:36
The asymmetry between negative and positive emotions and their impacts.
“is the personalization and then the building of our own self-image and the fragility around the influence the emotions create for us.”
The Role of Hope in Adaptation
24:36 to 27:45
How hope affects our adaptation to negative experiences and emotions.
“When we often reach it, it doesn't actually make us happy.”
Empathy and Self-Understanding
27:45 to 28:06
Discussing the concept of empathy towards oneself and its challenges.
“Well, I think so many of us have heard the importance of developing empathy for our interpersonal relationships, for becoming high IEQ, and you talk about this empathy gap for ourselves, like what is going on there?”
Understanding Empathy and Sympathy
28:06 to 31:44
Explore the distinctions between empathy and sympathy, and why true empathy may not exist.
“And how should we be looking at empathy when it comes to ourselves?”
Intrapersonal Empathy Gaps
33:46 to 40:49
Delve into how emotional states affect our empathy towards ourselves and others.
“But you started out by asking about empathy gaps.”
Show all 22 chapters
Torture and Human Experience
40:49 to 42:00
Analyze the psychological implications of torture techniques like waterboarding.
“I think maybe what you're referring to is the study of torture.”
Understanding Torture and Empathy
42:00 to 44:42
Explore how personal experiences can shift perceptions about torture and empathy.
“And he kind of publicly kept on saying a waterboarding big deal.”
The Impact of Emotions on Moral Judgment
46:48 to 56:00
Investigate how empathy gaps affect moral behavior and decision-making.
“Well, I think many of us don't recognize how the empathy gaps can distort our moral judgment.”
The Cycle of Fear in Climbing
56:00 to 57:10
Learn about the psychological effects of fear in high-stakes situations like climbing.
“But then, yeah, I mean, there's other there's other categories.”
Public Speaking and Its Challenges
57:10 to 59:18
Explore how the body's response during public speaking can exacerbate anxiety.
“And then the sewing machine leg gets worse.”
The Myth of Venting Emotions
59:18 to 1:01:04
Understand why venting anger may not be as beneficial as commonly believed.
“There's a quote from a researcher who says that trying to deal with anger by venting it is like trying to use gasoline to put out a fire.”
Real-Life Impact of Unresolved Anger
1:01:04 to 1:04:13
Hear a personal story illustrating how unresolved anger can affect one’s life.
“And she said, oh, let me write, I'm going to write to you about it.”
Healthy Ways to Manage Anger
1:04:13 to 1:08:26
Discover effective strategies for managing anger rather than venting it.
“And sometimes that involves perspective taking, which is something that we just don't naturally do.”
Insights on Emotions from Research
1:08:26 to 1:10:02
Learn how understanding emotions can influence personal behavior and self-perception.
“You need to kind of think about it in an open-minded way and perspective take.”
Understanding Negative Emotions and Meta-Emotions
1:10:02 to 1:13:48
Gain insights into recognizing and managing negative emotions and their effects.
“And my book is, I can't, my answer is, I wish I could say that studying this has changed me.”
The Importance of Self-Compassion
1:13:48 to 1:14:17
Explore why self-compassion is crucial for personal well-being.
“And I would say the two big ones are the kind of mitigation of these meta-emotions, and the other one is this there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I effect.”
Finding the Work of George Loewenstein
1:14:17 to 1:14:51
Learn where to find more information about George Loewenstein's work and book.
“guilty about our behaviors or actions because of them in the wake of those emotions, recognizing that it's just part of being human.”
Transcript
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0:35Start your free trial at shopify.com slash charm. That's shopify.com slash charm. Go start something. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu, now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13. An emotion is basically a program that evolved in our evolutionary past to deal with recurring situations of evolutionary significance, like escaping predators. Emotions are all-encompassing programs.
1:31They change our memory. They change our perceptions. They change our mindset. They change our hormones. They change our muscles. When we are in different emotional states, we are effectively different people. Emotions reprogram us, and we have as little empathy for ourselves in a different emotional state because we're really a different person when we're in a different emotional state as we have for another person.
2:10welcome to the show it's great to have you great to be on it you spent your whole career studying why people misjudge their own emotions if you had to boil it down to one sentence what is it i guess it's something i would call an empathy gap but it isn't about well it isn't mainly about interpersonal empathy. It's about empathy for yourself. And the basic idea is when you're in one emotional state, it's almost impossible to imagine how you would feel or behave if you were in a different emotional state. And that applies, like if you're in an emotionally cold state, you're not emotional. It's very difficult to imagine how you would feel or behave if you were in an emotional state.
2:59But the reverse is also true. When you're caught up in emotions, you lose perspective. And it's hard to imagine not being in the state that you're currently in. What's working against us here? Because it feels like for many of us, especially in our audience, they feel like they have a good handle on their emotions and they can work through them at will. Very few people really do have a good handle on your emotions. Even when you can, And let's say that you're very down, you're depressed, even when you can kind of at a cognitive level reason, OK, I'm depressed now, but I'm probably not going to be in the future.
3:40It still feels like you're going to be depressed forever. And this is the true this is like your true reality. Many of us would label that as a negative emotion that we want to get rid of. And we want to put a lot of effort to remove that feeling of depression or feeling of sadness. And because of that, we try to orient ourselves towards what we label as more positive emotions, pursuing happiness, pursuing joy. It's amazing to me how difficult it is to get rid of negative emotions. Well, nobody can really extricate them from their life in general. and it's not it isn't really that surprising i guess if you're depressed that it's not that easy to get out of depression because you know people go to see psychotherapists they take drugs things like that but there's some other there are some other types of emotions that are so counterproductive and yet people just can't move past them as part of the book that i wrote um the opposite of happiness, I did a very big survey, I called it the misery survey, with over 500 people.
4:49And I asked them about kind of their pet misery, like the misery that they most suffer from. And I asked them to tell me a story about it. And I asked them to tell me if they had any special insights into it. I asked them, when did that story that you told me, when did it happen? And how bad was it? And something that really struck me from looking at the responses was how many of these stories dated way, way back in people's lives. And let's say it was something like anger or envy or jealousy. People were, decades after the story happened, people were still suffering from the same emotion. Like anger, it seems like anger is such a miserable feeling, kind of corrosive anger, such a terrible feeling.
5:42And it would be so good for people to just walk away from it, to forgive and forget. But people just aren't able to do that. What goes along with that is the impact on our relationships. So carrying on to those emotions often will lead us to cutting that person out of our life, breaking a relationship that we've had for years, a partner, a spouse, a best friend, over this one distinct event and this emotion surrounding it, unable to look past that emotion and judge them more on the totality of their character or the relationship we've built up into that point. There's a category of people who are rejection sensitive.
6:21I think almost everyone is vulnerable to that to some degree, but some people are more vulnerable than others. And people who are rejection sensitive, very often they'll preemptively reject people because they're afraid of being rejected themselves, or they'll behave in ways that end up leading them to be rejected. There was a very cool study where they asked people to imagine that they have a partner and they go into the room and their partner's on the phone and they start talking to the partner, but the partner doesn't pay attention to them. And they ask, like, why do you think your partner would do that?
7:13And the people who are much less rejection sensitive say, oh, it was probably that there was something great on their phone that they couldn't separate themselves from and tear themselves away from. And the people who are rejection sensitive think that, oh, they're being hostile. And then the two groups are asked, like, how would you respond? and the first, the group that's less rejection sensitive says, oh, I just wait for them to finish viewing what they're viewing. And the rejection sensitive people say, oh, I'm going to wait till they want my attention and then I'll show them I'm not going to pay attention to them.
7:52So like, I mean, that's true of so many of these negative emotions. They tend to be kind of self-fulfilling. I mean, jealousy is one of the worst. By jealousy, I mean not, I have a separate chapters on envy and jealousy. Envy is kind of when you kind of like to have what somebody else has. Jealousy is a fear of losing somebody. It could be losing a friend, but usually it's losing a romantic partner. Romantic partner, yeah. And it's kind of striking how the degree to which extreme jealousy leads people, which is fear of losing someone, leads people to do exactly what ends up causing them to lose the person they're fearful of losing.
8:44What I think is so interesting about this, especially going back to the misery study, is how often that misery is one direction. So the person we cut off, might have no idea why we cut them off and have no idea that we're feeling miserable about it and about what they did to us. But we have that self-directed view around this emotion and the way that we color the world in our judgments of others. And the other person's walking around completely oblivious to what just happened and the misery that we're carrying because of them. In the modern world where we often communicate by texts and emails, I guess the young generation, it's all texts, no emails.
9:23But in any case, I think there's huge differences between people and how quickly they respond and also how quickly they expect other people to respond. I'm somebody who, if I send a text or an email, I really want a rapid response. And when I don't get a rapid response, like the person takes a few days, I don't think, oh, they must be busy. I think, oh, like maybe they hate me or something like that. I tend to kind of catastrophize. What's also interesting about that is our emotional state has nothing to really do with what the message is, but that is the way we'll view that message. So if I'm angry about something else and I get a response that's neutral or maybe a little rushed, I can read it as curt and anger from the other person and it can doubly anger me now that I'm seeing this message in an angry state in reading their perspective in an angrier way than was intended.
10:22Emails and texts are so dangerous because unlike face-to-face communication, where you have all sorts of context and facial cues and other types of information, it's so easy to misinterpret them. And so there's a famous study where people sent messages that were sarcastic, and the people who picked them up didn't interpret them that way. And that is just a disaster. Like they say, oh, you looked so terrible today. What they really mean is you looked amazing. But if you interpret it at face value, then you feel deeply insulted and insecure. That's another great example where someone's intention can be humorous, but our current emotional state doesn't allow that humor to come through or impact us in a positive way, and we can then read them and create our own personal misery around the way we read, that's something completely unintentional.
11:24And that's a terrible, perverse feature of our kind of emotional composition. When we are in a negative state, there's a phenomenon called mood-contingent judgment and mood-contingent memory also. When we are in a negative state, we tend to interpret things that happen to us, things that people say to us negatively, which kind of pins us down in our negative emotional state. In fact, it exacerbates the emotional state. And then also this phenomenon of mood-contingent memory, when we are in a negative state, we just naturally remember bad things like social blunders, bad things that happened to us, you know, and so on.
12:16And again, it pins us in a negative state. And there's a lot of perverse feedback mechanisms. Yeah. Yeah. What I found interesting around that is then its impact on self-esteem and the carryover effect of the way we view ourselves just from what you described. Some of those blunders, some of those mistakes, some of those just very human situations we find ourselves in can impact our self-esteem in really profound ways. I actually wrote an academic paper titled Fragile Self-Esteem, and it's exactly about that. And it's about the idea that you can get pinned down into a negative state or pinned down in a positive state.
12:56But if you're in the positive state, it's likely that you're always worrying about falling into the negative state and getting trapped there. There's some really nice research by the psychologist Roy Baumeister and others on violence and aggression. So it used to be believed that violent people had low self-esteem, but when they actually measured the self-esteem of violent people, it didn't turn out that way. It actually looked like they had high self-esteem. And then Baumeister came along and came up with this brilliant idea that people who are violent have high but fragile self-esteem. It's like they're walking on top of a wall and somebody's negative comment, or at least comment that could be interpreted negatively threatens to push them off the wall.
13:53And so they're always responding aggressively to any perceived slight. I think it's a really brilliant theory for understanding aggression. Double tapping on that, I think many of us feel that this idea of self-esteem is more durable than it really is. And we build it once and we just carry it through our lives. But in actuality, there's great science that shows that's not true at all. And one of the early chapters of my book is on self-esteem. And I talk about Mark Leary's sociometer theory. The sociometer theory is the idea that when we were evolving in small groups, it was really essential not to get ejected from your group.
14:41If you got ejected, you'd be vulnerable to predators. You wouldn't be able to share food. It was basically being rejected by your group. It was a death sentence. And so it was incredibly important for you to maintain the respect and esteem and liking of your group. And according to sociometer theory, self-esteem isn't really self-esteem. It's your appraisal. Self-esteem is really your appraisal of how your social group is evaluating you. And according to this theory, your self-esteem, it isn't a stable thing. It can vary from moment to moment. Somebody, some random stranger is rude to you, and your self-esteem can plummet.
15:37Like, yeah. And yeah, it's just, it's kind of crazy. All right, real talk. What are you paying for wireless right now? Whatever it is, I guarantee you're overpaying. That's the game these big carriers play. They hook you in with a deal and then the bill quietly climbs every few months. Mint Mobile doesn't do that. All of their plans right now are$15 a month, even unlimited. 15 bucks, high-speed data, unlimited talk and text on the T-Mobile 5G network. And you don't even have to give up your phone or number. You bring both. No monthly bill either. You pick a three, six, or 12-month plan up front.
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18:15is the personalization and then the building of our own self-image and the fragility around the influence the emotions create for us. That's right. And one of the central themes of my book is that when it comes to positive and negative emotions, there's a huge asymmetry. So when it comes to self-esteem, there's almost no depth, no bottom to the degree of bad self-esteem you can experience. And you can experience that for an awfully long time. When it comes to positive self-esteem, you can feel kind of good about yourself, but there's no kind of soaring to heights of high self-esteem, unless perhaps you're a narcissist.
19:00But even narcissists are famously insecure. And feelings of positive self-esteem also tend to be much more fleeting than feelings of negative self-esteem. And this is true kind of across the emotions. There's some emotions that don't even have a positive counterpart. Like, for example, envy. Envy is when you recognize that somebody else has something that seems desirable to you that you don't have. Right. And you feel bad. but suppose that you recognize that somebody else doesn't have something desirable that you do have like wouldn't it be nice if that made you feel really good and you know maybe it might feel make you feel a tiny bit good like you were able to gloat a tiny bit about your superiority but really it's much more likely unless you're kind of a psychopath unless it's much more likely that the emotion you're going to be experiencing is sympathy, another negative emotion.
20:11And so, yeah. So yeah, what I find so interesting. There's so many of these situations where the down, like you're walking on this ridge and there's a downside in one direction and a downside in the other direction. Yeah. And the asymmetry of it is fascinating. So I know obviously you're writing a book and you could have all of your colleagues give rave reviews, but yet that one negative critique from someone who doesn't know you at all is probably going to stick with you more than all of the positive. It doesn't matter if the positives reach tens of thousands. Same with our podcasts and videos.
20:47There's tons of people who are saying, oh, I love this. But those negative commenters, those people who say something about us that's piercing, weigh far more on our psyche than any amount of positivity. Yeah, that's right. I have that with teaching ratings. Like I remember verbatim a few negative comments that I got in my teaching ratings. There's a metaphor that Paul Rosen uses to describe this. It's the roach in the wine. If you take a barrel of the finest French wine and you drop a single roach into it, you ruin it. but you could take a vat of roaches and no amount of adding french wine is going to help make it attractive and it's a great metaphor like you go to dinner with your significant other let's say you go to a really nice fancy restaurant and the food is delicious and then she makes a thoughtless comment or even much more common, at least in my case, I make some kind of a thoughtless comment and I can tell she's bothered.
22:03And all of a sudden, you know, we might as well be in McDonald's, you know, I don't taste the food at all. Sunset's ruined. Yeah. Dinner's awful. Yeah, exactly. So what's going on with our brains there? Why is there such an asymmetry and imbalance here? I mean, it's because our brains are produced by evolution and evolution designed us to be, what all that evolution cares about is that we survive and reproduce. That's called, you know evolutionary fitness evolution um as the kind of um the um affective psychiatrist um randy nest said doesn't give a fig about whether we're happy happiness is just a mechanism that it gets to us to do things and unhappiness is as well but it turns out that kind of negative affective states are way more effective in getting us to do the things we need to do to improve our evolutionary fitness than positive affective states.
23:19There are all these, I mean, if you look at the shelves of bookstores, they're filled with books about happiness, and a lot of them are self-help books about how to achieve happiness. But if you actually read the academic literature on happiness, it turns out that psychologists are kind of flummoxed about what the function of happiness is. And it turns out that there's kind of a few different positive emotions. But if you look at someone's face, you can't distinguish what emotion they're feeling if they're in a positive state. But negative emotions are very distinct from one another. Like if we're afraid or if we're envious or, you know, humiliated, if we're ashamed, the face and the body posture is completely different for each of these.
24:13And they each have their own separate functions. And so evolution figured out very, very early that the negative emotions are kind of much more effective. The stick is way more effective than the carrot for getting us to do what we need to do to survive and reproduce. What I also find fascinating is what we think and perceive in the future will make us happy as the destination. When we often reach it, it doesn't actually make us happy. And then if we think back to our version of ourselves when we thought that would make us happy and we say, hey, we achieved it, we can recognize it. But that still doesn't make us feel happy.
24:57But so many of us get caught on this pursuit of happiness and then feeling unhappy even when we're achieving the things that we mentally thought would give us immense happiness. Right. I think that's absolutely true. And a big part of it is when something good happens to us and it just becomes part of who we are, it kind of recedes into the background. We take it for granted. it. And so we kind of hedonically adapt to it very, very rapidly. And so when we're thinking about, oh, let's say if you're an academic, if I publish this book, I'd be really happy. Well, the happiness lasts just an amazingly short period of time.
25:50Unfortunately, I mean, we do tend to, we do adapt to negative things as well. We can be happy and pretty diverse, or not too unhappy, in pretty terrible negative circumstances. But our adaptation to negatives is much slower and less complete than our adaptation to positive things. And there are all sorts of different things that can prevent us from adapting to negative things. Like the last chapter in the first half of my book is about hope, the downside of hope. And one of the things that can prevent us from adapting to negative things is exactly hope. Why is that the case? Like it doesn't rationally make sense.
26:40Logically, I'm sitting here saying, well, that doesn't make sense. Why is our brain wired in that way and what's happening there that is so misguided? When we think that there may be some prospect for relief in the future, our brain says, okay, I'm not going to do the mental work of adapting to this thing because maybe it will get better. But I mean, basically, adaptation to negative things happens when your brain programming decides that, okay, he's not going to, I'm trying to get him to change his behavior. I'm trying to get him to improve his situation. He's not doing it. Okay. It's not working.
27:24I'll cut off the negative feeling because it's just not, it's not succeeding. But then when you introduce a little bit of hope, then your brain is kind of not, it's not consciously thinking this, but at some level it's thinking, oh, well, maybe there is some prospect for improvement. I'm not going to adapt. It does make sense for me to keep hitting him with a stick, and maybe he'll do what he needs to do to make his situation better. Well, I think so many of us have heard the importance of developing empathy for our interpersonal relationships, for becoming high IEQ, and you talk about this empathy gap for ourselves, like what is going on there?
28:10What do you mean by that? And how should we be looking at empathy when it comes to ourselves? I personally think that empathy is impossible. It doesn't exist. I think we can be, let's start with other people. I think we can be sympathetic, possibly very sympathetic to towards somebody else. And that means that we feel bad because they feel bad. And I think, I mean, if you yourself are in a bad situation, other people's sympathy can be very rewarding, right? It's nice to think that somebody else is experiencing sympathy. But to me, empathy means feeling the same thing. So if you are depressed, I can be sympathetic that you feel depressed, but I'm not going to be depressed myself.
29:04And that would be empathy. So I can feel sympathy, but not empathy. But even when it comes to sympathy, I think there are huge limits on sympathy. If you feel depressed or you have a migraine or a backache, these are things that there's no external manifestation. For all I know, at this moment, you're in a deep depression, but you're not showing it to me. And so it's very hard for me to sympathize. Now, on the other hand, if you had broken your arm and there was a bone sticking out of your shoulder, I would be horrified and I'd be very sympathetic to you, even if the bone wasn't really bothering you at all.
29:50So another property of interpersonal sympathy is that there's really very little connection between how bad the target of your sympathy is feeling and how bad you are feeling. By empathy, if a bone is sticking out of your shoulder, I'm gonna feel bad, but it's not gonna feel like physical pain to me. And so I don't really believe in the existence of empathy. I think you can get a little bit of empathy with another person. I had an experience that a friend of mine had been complaining about back pains for years, really. And I would say, oh, God, that sounds terrible. But I never really empathized with it.
30:39And I'm not sure how much I even truly, at some visceral, deep levels, sympathized with it genuinely. and then I was doing some construction outdoors and I lifted up this big rock and then I felt something give in my back. And my instantaneous response was not, oh, this feels terrible for me. My instantaneous response was, oh, that's what he's been telling me all this time. I felt the surge of sympathy, maybe even a little bit of empathy toward my friend that I hadn't truly experienced until then. And I think that's a reason why when we are in miserable circumstances, if we are depressed or we have a migraine, we tend to feel kind of isolated because we think it feels like other people just can't feel our pain.
31:40And that's true. It's true that they can't feel our pain. All right. Real talk. What are you paying for wireless right now? Whatever it is, I guarantee you're overpaying. That's the game these big carriers play. They hook you in with a deal and then the bill quietly climbs every few months. Mint Mobile doesn't do that. All of their plans right now are$15 a month, even unlimited. 15 bucks, high speed data, unlimited talk and text on the T-Mobile 5G network. And you don't even have to give up your phone or number. You bring both. No monthly bill either. You pick a three, six, or 12-month plan up front.
32:14That's it. There's no catch. Mint Mobile just took what's wrong with wireless and fixed it. Get your new wireless plan for just$15 a month at mintmobile.com slash charm. That's mintmobile.com slash charm. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month. Upfront payment of$45 for three months, $90 for six months, or$180 for 12 months required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when the network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot. Capable device required. Availability speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. Here's something we learned building the art of charm.
32:57You cannot be the expert at everything. We found marketing support and dev talent on Upwork. Things we were not experts at, taken off our blade by people who are. We've shipped projects faster, gotten more traffic to our website, and even freed up our time for the work that only we can do. That's what Upwork does it connects you with specialists software development marketing design ai implementation whatever your business needs over a hundred and seventy thousand freelancers with five-star ratings you browse profiles review past work and hire with confidence there's no full-time commitment required post your job for free right now at upwork.com that's upwork.com Go post your job.
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34:16is, well, at least I'm not that person. At least I'm not in that bad of shape. But you started out by asking about empathy gaps. And really, the most interesting empathy gaps happen are what I call intra, not inter, personal. They happen within people. And so, and the empathy gap is like, we're basically creatures of our immediate emotional states. like when um the first chapter in the first chapter of my book i talk about like what is an emotion and i say that an emotion is um basically a program that um evolved in our evolutionary past to deal with recurring situations of evolutionary significance like escaping predators kind of winning partners, things like that.
35:14And emotions are all-encompassing programs. They change our memory, they change our perceptions, they change our mindset, they change our hormones, they change our muscles. Basically, when we are in different emotional states, we are effectively different people. If I'm angry or I'm sad, I'm more different from myself than, like, let's assume that the two of us are kind of in pretty fairly neutral emotional states right now than you are from me and I am from you. too. So emotions reprogram us and we have as little empathy for ourselves in a different emotional state because we're really a different person when we're in a different emotional state as we have for another person.
36:14And that's what I call an intrapersonal empathy gap. What is causing that tonal vision? Because I think many of our listeners are feeling, And wait a second, I can definitely imagine myself in these other emotional states. I have high EQ. I can have empathy for other people and imagine what it's like for the emotions that they're facing. I've done a whole lot of research which shows that people have almost no ability to bridge these empathy gaps. We put people into different affective states and we have them predict how they'll behave in a different state. And they completely mispredict their own behavior.
36:54Like, for example, I did a bunch of studies with my friend and colleague, Leif Van Boven, where we asked people if they would do kind of scary things in the future. And when things are in the future, we tend to not be in touch with our fear. And people would say, oh, sure, I will dance or mime in front of the class for$5 next week. No problem. And then next week would arrive and almost everybody would chicken out because now they're actually experiencing the pain. And I also kind of did studies with addicts. And we looked at addicts. There were these addicts who were in treatment with buprenorphine, which is kind of an opioid substitute.
37:49and we caught people either right before they got their buprenorphine, they came to the clinic and we caught them either right before they got their buprenorphine, so they were in a state of high craving, or right after they got their buprenorphine, so they were not craving the drug. They were feeling satiated. And then we asked them, five days from now, when you come back to the clinic, what would you prefer? To get an extra dose of buprenorphine or$10? Extra dose of buprenorphine or$20 up to$100. And what we found was, and this is a real choice that we gave them, and what we found was when they were in a craving state, they valued the extra dose a week, five days later, twice as highly as when they were in a satiated state, because they were in touch that when they were craving, they knew what it was like to be craving.
38:49And when they weren't craving, they'd lost immediately, just moments later, moments after getting their dose of buprenorphine, they'd lost touch with what it feels like to crave drugs. And these are people who have probably been in and out of a craving state hundreds or thousands of times in their life, so they should know. But we're just, experience doesn't really help. Like, we are just creatures of our immediate emotional state. And no matter how high our EQ is, people are unable to bridge the gap. I've never observed that there are people who are better at this than other people. I think over time, you can learn to bridge empathy gaps.
39:41You can learn strategies. Oh, if I go to the bar and have a drink, then I'm going to smoke a cigarette. Or if I go into the bar and have a drink, I'm going to get into a fight. I'm not going to go to the bar. But when you do that, You're just learning, okay, going to the bar is a bad idea, because I know this from experience. You're not actually in touch with who you'll become if you go to the bar and have a drink. So it's true, you can learn about your own patterns of behavior, but you can never bridge empathy gaps in the sense of actually being able to imagine how you will feel if you're in a different emotional state.
40:27Well, one of the studies in the book, the ice bucket experiment and exposure, I think, is a little astounding for many of our audience. I think the pantomime in front of the room and that sense of embarrassment, we kind of all nod our heads, but I think we misjudge our ability to stick with the visceral pain and the memory there. I think that experiment really stood out to me. Could you walk our audience through it? I think maybe what you're referring to is the study of torture. And during the Bush administration, when we were involved in the war in Iraq, the Bush administration started engaging in interrogation techniques that had been widely viewed as torture.
41:15And one of those was waterboarding. Like probably our most basic instinct is breathing. Even if you basically destroy somebody's brain, the breathing instinct is in your brain stem. It's the most important function for survival. And the people in the Bush administration, like Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that waterboarding was no big deal. They said it's not torture because the U.S. had signed on to a treaty, to a U.N. treaty, barring us from doing torture. But they said waterboarding isn't torture. But and there was a famous Chicago talk host named Menko. And he kind of publicly kept on saying a waterboarding big deal.
42:10Waterboarding isn't torture. and he agreed to get waterboarded himself. And within, I mean, people who get waterboarded, it unfolds over a period of minutes. But Menko, after a matter of a few seconds, he started flailing his hands and he kind of threw the apparatus off. And he said, this is horrible. It is torture. It only took him like a few seconds to recognize that waterboarding was torture. I think in the study of mine that you're talking about, we asked people whether putting people in a cold room for an extended period, is that enhanced interrogation or is that torture? And when we just asked people kind of in a neutral state, which it was, a lot of people said, oh, that's enhanced interrogation.
43:18That's not torture. But all it took was, this was research with Loran Nordgren at Northwestern University. All it took was for people to put their hand in a bowl of ice water, which psychologists use this as a method of inducing pain. It's really surprisingly painful. And just doing that changed people's perceptions of whether being in a cold room was enhanced interrogation or counted as torture. And sometimes it's like in the example that I gave of hurting my back and suddenly empathizing my friend who had been complaining of a hurt back, sometimes it takes, all it takes is a little taste of a misery to come closer towards empathizing with a person's misery and certainly coming a lot closer to sympathizing with that misery.
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46:04Things we were not experts at. Taken off our blade by people who are. We've shipped projects faster. gotten more traffic to our website, and even freed up our time for the work that only we can do. That's what Upwork does. It connects you with specialists, software development, marketing, design, AI implementation, whatever your business needs. Over 170 ,000 freelancers with five-star ratings. You browse profiles, review past work, and hire with confidence. There's no full-time commitment required. Post your job for free right now at Upwork.com. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Go post your job. Well, I think many of us don't recognize how the empathy gaps can distort our moral judgment.
46:56I think we separate our moral judgment with our character and what we know is right and wrong. and it's hard for us to then recognize that, no, these empathy gaps can actually distort that in really meaningful ways and make us, even as we view ourselves as moral characters, do immoral things. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. When we're under the thrall of a strong emotion, we'll very often do things that violate our own moral standards. And these empathy gaps work in another way as well. I mentioned that we have an empathy gap for drug craving. If you're not craving a drug, even if you're an addict, if you're not craving a drug, it's impossible to imagine how powerful craving could be in terms of influencing our behavior.
47:48So like I asked, I used to teach a freshman seminar on drug abuse and addiction. And I'd ask my students, If you got addicted to heroin, do you think you would ever, is it possible that you would ever steal from your parents or abandon your children? And everyone said, oh, there's no way I would ever do that. But of course, people who are addicted to heroin kind of routinely do things like that. and um it's and we morally judge them especially severely because we think oh i wouldn't do that if i if i were in a craving state i wouldn't do that and but that's just false that's just a perfect manifestation of an empathy gap if we were in such a craving state we would do exactly that and probably worse.
48:44So yeah, it works. And also these emotions lead us to violate our own emotional standards and they lead us when we're not emotional to judge other people much more severely. And then we also hold our memories to have more of a stark impact on us than they do. So the retrospective blind spot and this great story of Mike Stroud in Antarctica, where many of us externally, it would be like, what is this guy thinking? Why is he doing this to himself? But we all have this blind spot. That's right. We do. And in some ways, it's probably good for evolutionary fitness, like in terms of the poor memory for pain probably helps to explain why people have second, why women give birth to second and third children.
49:35Yeah, right. So what happened with Mike in Antarctica? Oh, well, the example of, oh, well, two things happened with Mike in Antarctica. One was that his, so this is the first unaided crossing of Antarctica by foot. And he was with a guy named Randolph Fiennes, who's like a true kind of stoic, like an unbelievable explorer guy. And his Fiennes foot was eroding, like it was getting eroded by frostbite. And he was in excruciating pain. And Strout reports that when, like, and so Fiennes, even though he's like an unbelievable tough guy, every once in a while, he just couldn't stand. He couldn't stand not to kind of reveal how much pain he was in.
50:37And then Mike Strout would tell him, oh, that's terrible. I feel for you. I feel your pain. But then Strout comments that he didn't really feel his pain because pain is something that can't be shared. But I think actually you're referring to another part of the book. And that is that this Antarctic crossing was probably the most, not only because of eroded feet, but because of being cold all the time and miserable and food deprived and things like that. It was just like an unrelentingly miserable experience. And the whole time Stroud is thinking about going home and being with his children and how he's never going to do something like this again.
51:28and then so it's 97 days for the audience like 97 days of just punishment grueling freezing punishment near starvation suffering and of course going through it he's what everyone would be daydreaming about like getting back to your family and heat and food and everything that you love yeah and he's thinking i'm never going to do something like this again and then he gets back to his family. And I think he's playing with one of his kids. And he says that part of his brain is longing to get back out and do the next feat. And he talks about the memory trick is doing its work on me again. And the memory trick he's talking about is exactly the empathy gap that when we're not in a state of misery, it's just impossible for us to be in touch with the misery that a state of misery, even if we experienced it ourselves not very long ago.
52:35Now, many of our listeners self-identify as high performers and in that identity say, oh, I perform under pressure. Just raise the stakes and I will meet the challenge in front and they certainly don't believe that they're going to choke. So what actually happens when we raise the stakes? Do people really perform better? Well, so I have a chapter in the book on choking under pressure. I open it with a personal story about myself. And certainly there are people who are better at dealing with pressure than other people. But at some sufficiently high level of kind of motivation, I think pretty much everyone is going to choke under pressure.
53:26And choking, I have recently been doing a lot of research and writing about attention, about the attention being a resource, like land, labor, capital, attention. Attention has become the new economic factor of production. So I'm very interested in attention. And if you look at cases of choking under pressure, a lot of them have to do with attention. Like, for example, let's say that you play golf. And I don't play golf, so I'm probably about to show off my ignorance. but you swing your club hundreds or thousands of times, and you automate the club, your swing, your golf swing. And then you get into, you make a bet with a friend, or you get into a tournament, and your brain just automatically says to itself, oh, this is really important, and I've got this scarce resource, attention, and I should use my scarce resource to deal with this really, really important situation.
54:45And so even though it's the last thing you should be doing, you pay attention to your swing. You think about the swing. And then once you think about it, all the kind of programming falls out the window. Or another example would be, you are in a, let's say you're a podcaster and let's say you have like a really, really important guest on your show, Barack Obama. It's like the best guest you ever had. And you are, and you've been interviewing and you're an experienced interviewer, but this one's really important. And you start thinking to yourself, oh, if I blow this, I'm blowing the opportunity of my life.
55:33And oh, it would be so great if this works out, it's going to be so great, it's going to project my podcast into the stratosphere. And so instead of thinking about the conversation with Barack, you are focusing on the upside and downside of the interview going well or badly. And so a whole lot of different forms of choking have to do with attention. But then, yeah, I mean, there's other there's other categories. Like, for example, I talk about I used to do a lot of rock climbing and mountaineering. And if you get into a bad I don't I don't think this is true of like the really great mountaineers.
56:19And probably that's one reason why they are great mountaineers. But if you are more of an amateur and you get into a bad spot, like where you don't feel like you're very well protected by the rope or the protection you've put in is like, if you fall, it's likely to come out and you get scared. Well, what happened to me is that I would get something I call sewing machine leg. And sewing machine leg is your foot starts just automatically going like this, which is like the worst possible thing that could happen to you if you are kind of trying to hang on to a rock. And then it starts doing that. And you think, oh, God, my sewing machine leg thing is going to knock me off the rock.
57:10And you get even more scared. And then the sewing machine leg gets worse. And there's this feedback cycle, which makes the choking even worse. I mean, I think everyone will choke under some circumstances, but for some people, choking happens more easily than for other people. Actually, one of the most pervasive for the biggest fear of the largest number of people is public speaking. And what happens when you engage in public speaking? Well, when you engage in public speaking, your brain is saying, this is really important, and I'm going to shut down my digestive system. And that's a good thing, because if you're up on the podium, you don't have to run off the podium to go take care of your bodily needs.
58:09But in another way, it's not a good thing because part of digestion is like producing saliva. That's part of the digestive process. And so you're public speaking and you don't produce the saliva. And then you experience this phenomenon called dry mouth. So then you start talking like this. And of course, grabbing your water constantly. When you realize that you're talking like this, it makes you realize, oh, I'm performing badly. You get more tense and your brain says, oh, I really have to shut down that digestive system. And so, you get another one of these feedback processes. And then you walk off stage in anger and you've been told, all you got to do is go vent to your friends, go vent to your family about that anger you're carrying and you'll empty that anger from your system.
59:04But in actuality, you're just breathing new life into that anger. Why do so many of us think that if we can just vent our emotions away, we can release them, empty them and move forward. And they're so misguided. That's right. There's a quote in my book. There's a quote from a researcher who says that trying to deal with anger by venting it is like trying to use gasoline to put out a fire. Not a good idea. But why do we think that we can vent it away? Where is that coming from, that we have this belief that, oh, if we just share this now, we dump this anger onto our friends, we're releasing it?
59:46I mean, I think a lot of that comes from kind of psychoanalytic perspectives that have kind of a hydraulic view of the human psyche. That's like, if we can verbalize stuff, it's like we will drain, that will relieve the pressure. And I mean, I think there are some situations where that's true. Like, for example, I'm very interested in something I call the drive to disclose. Like you have some personal thing weighing on you, or maybe you'd like to brag, or you have some great piece of gossip, and you're dying to share that with another person. That's the drive to disclose. And I do think that sharing that can relieve the drive to disclose is kind of an internal pressure.
1:00:46I've got this inside of me. I've got to release it. And when you do disclose it to somebody, it does feel good and it does relieve the pressure. So in some situations, I do think that the hydraulic metaphor is an apt one. But when it comes to anger, it doesn't work at all. trying to trying to mitigate your anger by venting it like just it's like the vent it's like throwing like blowing air on a fire well you have an anecdote of a friend over email who had something incredibly tragic happen and it just the anger continued to get worse and build it was not something that was relieved what happened yeah that's right it's a it's a friend who a long-term close friend i in addition to doing the um misery survey i also um i when i got together with friends since i was working on the book i'd say do um are there any um emotions that you experience negative emotions you experience especially intensely.
1:02:05And this person said, oh, yeah, anger. And I asked her, well, can you explain? And she said, oh, let me write, I'm going to write to you about it. And she sent me several pages about it. And she got pregnant, and she had a child, and it was like an unbelievably unbelievably meaningful experience for her, certainly the most meaningful experience of her whole life. But then I think the baby was about three months old, and she got an email, and it was from a guy. And the email was, I thought you might want to know that my girlfriend is cheating with your husband. And so she realized that she felt like she was sharing this incredibly meaningful thing with her husband.
1:03:15But then she discovered that he had been in a very different mind state and kind of behaving very differently from what she believed. And And she said that the anger was just like eating her up. It was keeping her from sleeping. And so many of the different descriptions of anger that I got from her and from other and from people from the misery survey referred to anger as toxic or as acid eating away at you. And as I said before, it is just striking to me how people cannot get past this anger. yeah and i think it also drives us in physical ways you know classic advice might be to punch a punching bag or yell into a pillow to again this concept of vent and and have the sense of catharsis of letting the anger out of our body but that actually just doubles down on the anger that's right yeah i think ultimately the only solution to anger is you have to find a way to kind of forgive the other person.
1:04:36And sometimes that involves perspective taking, which is something that we just don't naturally do. We're not naturally good at perspective taking. But sometimes somebody can say, well, weren't you in this situation that was somewhat analogous and couldn't you say that you kind of behaved this way in the past. And that is a whole lot more effective than trying to vent the anger. I actually opened the book with an anecdote about getting this email that was from a guy in my field. And it was an email that wasn't meant for me. It was about me. And in the email, this person accused me of not properly acknowledging their research, their work.
1:05:43And my initial reaction was like intense anger. And I mean, it was very insulting toward me. But fortunately, I wasn't able to respond immediately. I had almost a whole day to think about it before I responded. And I was hanging out with a friend that day. And he helped me to kind of process it. But I started to think about, oh, yeah, there were situations where I felt like other people didn't acknowledge my seminal research. And it would end weren't there situations where it would have been so easy for me to send an email to the wrong person, and so on. And by the end of the day, the anger had really kind of given way almost to sympathy and to kind of an understanding of this other person.
1:06:45And I sent a very kind of reconciliatory or conciliatory message to them, which ended up being a very good thing. I mean, people, you should never, ever respond immediately when you're in a situation of anger, like never respond immediately to an email that makes you angry. And absolutely, you should never cc other people than the person who makes you angry i've seen so many situations where somebody gets angry about something and sends the response to this huge they feel so self-righteously indignant they send the response to a huge distribution list of people not realizing how badly that's going to come across.
1:07:43So even though my book is absolutely not a self-help book, but let me introduce an element of self-help into this podcast. If you ever get an email or a text that makes you really angry, never, ever respond to it. Don't even respond after 10 minutes, because you might think, okay, after 10 minutes, I've had a chance to cool down. That's not true. You might have just had a chance to incubate. And so it really takes at least a day to truly cool down. And just the passage of time isn't enough. You need to kind of think about it in an open-minded way and perspective take. So knowing all of your research and putting this book together and your view now of these emotions, what have you done personally to change what happens when you're feeling these strong emotions?
1:08:47Because I think so many of our listeners have sort of oriented themselves around the pursuit of happiness and the labeling of these emotions and done some things that are maladaptive for what the emotions are telling us. i mean people often ask me this like how is studying um emotions change changed your behavior and i'm sure it has in various ways like i have a if i'm in a down state i i it must be that i have a better understanding of what it's like to be in an upstate but i think these things are so intrinsic to kind of human existence. When I do get into a down state, like maybe depressed with a small d, I do lose perspective.
1:09:39So maybe I'm a little bit better at saying, okay, I know that people get out of down states, but I know I will get out of this down state. I might be a little bit better at not reacting angrily when I get an email that makes me angry. But really, I think these are just about being human. And my book is, I can't, my answer is, I wish I could say that studying this has changed me. But when I get depressed, it still feels like I always have been depressed, always will be depressed. It doesn't save me from the things that I talk about in the book. And I do think that there are ways that kind of gaining the insights from the book can help you.
1:10:35I mean, as I said, it's not a self-help book. It's a book about insight. It can give you insights into your own emotions. It can give you insights into the negative emotions of people around you. And I think it can, to some degree, make you less critical of yourself. One of the things I talk about in the book is meta-emotions. These are emotions about emotions. and very often so very often we tort emotions torture us and then we torture ourselves with these meta emotions like for example we feel envy towards a friend and then we feel and we're not supposed to feel and you're not supposed to feel envy towards a friend if something guilty or shame them yeah if something good that happens to them we're supposed to respond with unmitigated joy, but we feel envy, and then we feel guilty about feeling envious.
1:11:32And I think that understanding of having a better understanding of negative emotions maybe can help to mitigate these meta-emotions to some degree. I think that there's another way that reading the book can help you maybe to feel better. I think it had this effect on me and various friends who I gave advanced copies to who read the book said, okay, I get that this is not a self-help book, but actually reading this book did make me feel better in certain ways. And there's an awful lot of different ways of being miserable. Like I talk about 12 specific miseries in my book. And most of us, hopefully, only suffer from a subset of those.
1:12:28Like I only, I have two that I'm not going to share them, but I have two that I'm particularly prone to. But reading these descriptions from the misery survey and reading the academic literature on all of these other emotions, I often found that I had the experience there but for the grace of God. It wasn't that I was kind of gloating because I was better than the people who had negative emotions. I just experienced this sense of relief. Oh, thank God I don't experience that. That sounds so terrible. and so I do think that reading the book can mostly my goal in this book is to provide insights in the same way that if you read a novel a sad novel you're going to gain psychological insights into the characters and in the novel and hopefully insights into yourself right and I'm I really hope that reading the book will provide people with insights into negative emotions.
1:13:41But I do think that there's some possible silver linings that people can get. And I would say the two big ones are the kind of mitigation of these meta-emotions, and the other one is this there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I effect. Yeah, I would add a third of self-compassion, recognizing that even you who put the book together, did the research, the experience, looked at the data, still have these natural forces inside of us that knowing what we know, we don't have to feel so guilty about our behaviors or actions because of them in the wake of those emotions, recognizing that it's just part of being human.
1:14:24That's right. And when we think about compassion, this kind of relates back to the empathy gap. When we think about compassion, we usually think about compassion for other people. But you're absolutely right that compassion for yourself might be a much more important determinant of our day-to-day well-being. Thank you again for joining us. I really enjoyed this conversation and the book. Where can our audience find out more about your work and the book? Thank you, AJ. I really enjoyed the conversation as well. And the easiest way to find out about the book is to go to the website oppositeofhappiness.com.
1:15:06And I have a bunch of stuff about the book and endorsements, things like that. So that's the best way to learn about it. Thank you again for joining us. Thank you.
1:15:50The Mandalorian and Grogu Now streaming on Disney+. Rated PG-13.
From the publisher
Your emotions don’t just change how you feel—they can change what you remember, how you judge other people, and even who you become in the moment.
AJ sits down with behavioral economist George Loewenstein to explore the “empathy gap”: our surprising inability to predict how we’ll think and behave when our emotional state changes. George explains why anger can distort judgment, rejection sensitivity becomes self-fulfilling, negative experiences outweigh positive ones, and the happiness we chase often disappears faster than we expect.
You’ll learn why high performers can still choke under pressure, why venting anger often makes it worse, how emotions influence self-esteem and relationships, and why you should never respond immediately to an email that makes you furious. This conversation offers a fascinating look at the hidden forces shaping our decisions—and why understanding our emotions doesn’t always mean we can control them.
Episode Resources:
https://www.amazon.com/Opposite-Happiness-Feelings-Make-Break/dp/0063427060/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0
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Chapters
00:00 – The empathy gap: why we misjudge our own emotions08:00 – How your mood changes the way you read other people17:15 – Why one negative moment outweighs all the good24:20 – Why empathy may not work the way we think31:00 – Why we can’t predict ourselves under pressure39:05 – How emotions distort moral judgment45:00 – Why high performers still choke under pressure51:10 – Why venting anger can make it worse57:30 – Never respond to an angry email immediately01:03:00 – Negative emotions, self-compassion, and being human
Keywords
emotional intelligence, emotions, empathy gap, psychology, behavioral economics, emotional regulation, anger, self awareness, happiness, negative emotions, self esteem, rejection sensitivity, decision making, cognitive bias, stress, performance under pressure, relationships, emotional health, self compassion, human behavior
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