Primed For Ripeness

By Wray Herbert

There was a time when the world was full of women named Daisy and Iris and Lily and Rose. Naming daughters after nature’s blooms was considered a high compliment, a celebration of feminine beauty. Flowery names aren’t in fashion so much these days, but the tradition of linking blossoms and womanhood runs long and deep. Just think back on the romantic imagery of Shakespeare or Burns or Keats.

The tradition may go back even further than that as it turns out, way back before poetry and language, and indeed may be deep-wired into our neurons. Some psychologists are now suggesting that the association between blooming flowers and womanhood may have ancient evolutionary roots, indeed that our liking for sprays of heather and violets may be the vestige of a long-lost survival skill: the ability to spot a good sexual partner. What’s more, this primordial connection may explain all sorts of modern human preferences that are completely unrelated to sexuality or mating.

Here’s the basic idea. When our ancient ancestors were first becoming human, the key to the species’ survival was sexual “fitness.” That is, primitive humans had to find strategies to produce hardy offspring, who then did the same, and on and on. One of these primitive strategies was an ability to select, from all the possible mates, the most healthy and fertile. Put another way, early humans became hypersensitive to signs of ripeness, and this hypersensitivity became deeply engrained in our perception and thinking and emotion, where it remains today.

What happens with these primitive skills, though, is that they are blunt instruments. They don’t discriminate well, so that a cognitive shortcut that was intended for mate selection is also applied to other living things—apples, for example, or greyhounds or marigolds. So today we retain a hard-wired bias that makes us favor any living thing at its peak, and to disfavor anything that’s unripe or in decline.

At least that’s the theory, which Yale University psychologists Julie Huang and John Bargh decided to test in the laboratory. They designed a series of experiments to see if, by piquing the fundamental human desire to mate, they could increase people’s sensitivity to a variety of cues to immaturity, growth, peak ripeness, and decay.

Here’s an example from their lab. The psychologists had a group of volunteers, all young adults, read a passage from the book See Jane Date, by Melissa Senate. This book is apparently a classic of “chick lit,” focusing on the lives of unmarried but nubile young women, and it was intended to jump-start the readers’ mating instinct. Another comparable group of volunteers read a bland passage describing the interior of a building.

Then they had both groups look at four photographs of the actress Jane Withers, each from a different stage of her long acting career. Some may remember Jane Withers as “Josephine the Plumber,” in the TV ads for the cleanser Comet, in the 1960s, but she actually began acting in the 1930s as an adorable toddler, and also played roles as a teen and as a leading lady. The photos showed all of these stages of her life.

The volunteers were then asked to rate the four images in terms of the actress’s appeal. The idea was that those with mating on their mind would find the actress much more appealing in her prime, and devalue her when she was either older or sexually immature. And that’s exactly what they found. Those who had not been primed for sex showed no strong preferences for prime years over youth or later years.

So this supports the evolutionary link between the “ripeness bias” and tastes in human beauty. But does the bias go beyond humans? To test this, Huang and Bargh modified the experiment a bit. They again primed some of the volunteers with the passage from See Jane Date, but this time they had them look at photographs of bananas. Some of the bananas were green, some yellow-green, some completely yellow, and some mottled with brown spots. All the volunteers then rated the attractiveness of the fruit.

I know what you’re thinking. Yes, most of us prefer yellow bananas to either green or brown bananas. They generally taste better and have better texture. But what the psychologists were measuring was the difference between volunteers who had been primed for mating and those who had not. And they did find a big difference in their preference for perfectly ripe bananas and for bananas before or after their peak.

So it really does seem that people are primed for ripeness. But for those who remain skeptical, the psychologists decided to check this notion one more way. There were no automobiles on the savannahs three million years ago; not even carts. So if the theory is sound, these same fundamental preferences for peak age over newness and senescence should apply only to living things, not artifacts. The psychologists ran one more experiment, basically the same as the other two, but in this one they had the volunteers rate photos of flowers and cars. They predicted that they would have maturity-related preferences when it came to flowers, but not when it came to cars.

An automobile’s peak, for this study, was when the car rolled off the assembly line, spanking new. Other photos showed the car under construction or beginning to rust with age. The flowers went from bud to full flowering to wilting. And the scientists found just what they expected. That is, being primed for mating did shape people’s preference for blooming flowers, but it had no effect on their preferences for the life stages of a car. We may not like to see our trusty old cars rust out, but it apparently has no deep psychological resonance.

These findings, reported in the June issue of Psychological Science, may go way beyond our preferences for floral imagery and women’s names, the authors conclude. Think of a completely unrelated social domain, like the workplace. If these age-related biases really do run so deep, and are so easily activated, might they have an effect on, say, our judgments of career ability? Ageism may have deeper roots than we know.

For other insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. A version of this blog now appears in the magazine Scientific American Mind and the website http://www.sciam.com/.

The Neurology of Stereotypes

By Wray Herbert

I once attended a polytechnic school where the mascot was an engineer. It was a men’s school, so the image of the mascot was a kind of geeky looking guy. He wore a goofy hat and was always surveying land or harnessing electrical power or some such. It was an unflattering caricature, and meant to be funny in a self-deprecating kind of way.

A lot of students and alumni didn’t like it, though, and the engineer was eventually replaced with a bird. That’s the problem with stereotypes: They contain enough truth to be both humorous and cruel. We all use stereotypes, probably more than we’d care to admit, because they are fast and efficient cognitive shortcuts that save us a lot of time and energy. You probably have a caricature of an engineer in your mind’s eye right now.

Psychologists are very interested in stereotypes, and how the brain processes them. Do we know when we are falling back on a broad caricature, or do we use them automatically, without deliberation or conscious awareness? How do we police our own lazy mental habits to avoid harming others with simplistic stereotypical thinking? Do we know that stereotypes are wrong, yet find them too psychologically tempting to avoid?

Psychologist Wim De Neys of Leuven University, Belgium, decided that the best way to explore these questions was to actually look at the brain in action. Past research has shown that a particular region of the brain’s frontal lobe becomes active when we detect conflict in our thinking—between an easy stereotype, say, and a more reasoned and complex view. But actually overriding stereotypical thinking requires another part of the frontal lobe. De Neys basically wanted see if stereotypical thinking is a detection problem or a self-control problem. To see, he watched these two brain regions during stereotypical thinking, to see what lit up.

He used a classic psychology problem to make people summon up the stereotypes residing in their neurons. Here’s how it works: Say there’s a room with 1000 people in it, and we know that 995 are lawyers and the other five are engineers. We get to meet just one of these people, named Jack, picked randomly from the group. We learn that Jack is 45-years-old and has four children. He has little interest in politics or social issues and is generally conservative. He likes sailing and mathematical puzzles. Is Jack a lawyer, or an engineer?

Well, which is he? Logically, if you use the statistical part of your brain only, the obvious answer is that he’s a lawyer, simply because there are all those lawyers in the room and there’s a better chance of meeting a lawyer in the room than an engineer. But a lot of people immediately say engineer because Jack fits a stereotype. The majority of even highly educated people do this. Others do say lawyer—and so quickly that it seems instantaneous—but the question is whether the brain needs to quash that powerful engineer caricature in order to give the more reasoned response.

De Neys watched volunteers’ brains as they puzzled through this and similar problems. He found (and describes in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science) that the brain’s stereotype detector lit up regardless of whether the subject answered stereotypically or rationally. So apparently we all detect the stereotype and recognize that it is out of sync with reality. But the brain’s inhibition center—the part of the brain that says, “No, I am not falling for that simplistic idea”—lit up only when the subjects actually reasoned that Jack was a lawyer—that is, only when they overrode the stereotype and made a calculation based on probability. Apparently some of us find the ready caricatures too tempting and use them anyway, against our better judgment.

This goes way beyond fairness to engineers. Think about another stereotype, this one the typical lung cancer victim. He’s old, right? That’s at least the stereotype that most teenagers have, and the one they use to justify taking up smoking. Young people don’t die of lung cancer, so smoking must not be risky for the young—all scientific evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Stereotypes can indeed be cruel and hurtful—even to those who conjure them up.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. This blog now also appears in both the print and web editions of Scientific American Mind at www.sciam.com.

The Gist of the Matter

By Wray Herbert

I had a brief stint teaching writing and rhetoric to college freshmen, and I tried to pass on to my students a valued lesson a favorite professor had given me. Nuance is good; generalities are facile. Be wary of any thinker who thinks in black or white, insists on yes or no, or argues without gradation or grayness or subtlety. God is in the details.

I guess I still believe that. But I’ll have to say that the intervening years of parenting have given me an appreciation for some plain and absolute values: AIDS, bad. Seat belts, good. Heroin, bad. And so forth. I’m not really interested in discussing the subtleties of these positions. Am I getting more rigid as I get older?

Well, maybe I am, but that may not be an entirely bad thing. Recent psychological research suggests that our brains are like hybrid engines, switching back and forth between two very different kinds of thinking. Sometimes we crunch data and painstakingly calculate choices and positions, and sometimes we rapidly and automatically seize on the essence, the simple value, the gist of the matter. And how we think determines in large part the decisions we make. The trick is in knowing when to do which.

Teenagers are not very good at this, as it turns out, with sometimes tragic consequences. Consider this recent experiment by three Cornell University psychologists. Britain Mills, Valerie Reyna and Steven Estrada used a laboratory manipulation to trigger either precise, quantitative thinking or unnuanced “gist thinking” in a large sample of high school students. Then they studied their actual life choices, and their intentions for the near future. The topic was sex and its risks, including pregnancy and diseases like syphilis and AIDS.

Here’s an example of the triggers that the psychologists used. Sometimes they asked a specific question, like: “Are you likely to get pregnant or get someone pregnant in the next six months?” Other times they asked very general questions, like: “Overall, for you, which of the following best describes the risks of having sex: low, medium or high?” The idea here is that precise questions trigger precise memories—actual literal memories of past experiences—and that recalling these specific events jumpstarts the brain process devoted to fine-grain analysis: They start actually weighing risks and benefits, and when they do that, they often end up rationalizing “acceptable risk.” The global questions, by contrast, summon up simple values and qualitative thinking, like: “Risk, bad. Avoid risk.”

They also asked the teenagers to say yes or no to statements like these: “Less risk is better than more risk” and “No risk is better than some risk.” The idea was to sort out the absolute thinkers from the relativists, on the theory that any thinking about relative risk puts the brain into analytic mode, which in turn leads (paradoxically) to increased risk-taking.

And paradoxical or not, that is exactly what the scientists found. They subsequently asked all the students not only if they had had sex already, but also the specifics of what they were planning on: sex within the coming year, sex before age 20, and so forth. As reported in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, the teenagers who weighed the relative risks and benefits of sex were much more likely to actually have sex (or plan on it) than were those who thought in global ways about risk and peril. Put another way, simple absolute values were protective. Too much data crunching was not. Or to borrow a newer version of the old maxim: “The devil’s in the details.”

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

A Deadly Philosophy

By Wray Herbert

Humans are the only species that systematically murders its own for ideological reasons. More than 50 million people were victims of mass murder in the 20th century, making it the deadliest century on record. That included the Ottoman Turks’ murder of 1.5 million Armenians, the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews, Mao’s murder of 30 million Chinese, and the Khmer Rouge’s destruction of 1.7 million Cambodians. The list goes on.*

Some of these deaths had to do with land and water and such, but most did not. Most were over philosophy. Why would this be? Philosophy is not threatening in any literal sense; it can’t maim or make you die, even when it’s very different from your view. Psychologists are very interested in this paradox: Why is philosophy—or worldview, or ideology—so threatening? Put another way, what are the cognitive and emotional underpinnings of mass murder and genocide?

One emerging theory suggests that genocide may make sense, at least on an emotional level. Think of it this way. Besides being the only animal to murder on principle, humans are also the only animal cognitively advanced enough to understand mortality. We all know we are going to die, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent this. That fact should be utterly terrifying, so terrifying that we should be paralyzed by fear and trembling.

But we’re not. We get up every morning, dress and groom ourselves, go to work, play with the kids, and so forth. How do we manage this? Well, one way we manage is by constructing meaning, and we do that by imagining a meaningful world. That’s called philosophy—or religion, or whatever. Humans are meaning-making creatures.

The problem occurs when our carefully constructed philosophy is threatened. And the greatest threat to a belief system is, well, an alternative belief system. To put it bluntly, your unfamiliar worldview makes me keenly aware of my mortality; it threatens my very existence. So why shouldn’t I wish you dead? Philosophy is personal.

Scientists have actually been studying this entanglement of personal mortality and cultural hatred in the lab, with some interesting results. Here’s a recent experiment by Joseph Hayes and his colleagues at the University of Alberta, Canada. These psychologists wanted to explore whether a philosophical threat could indeed conjure up thoughts of death, and further whether those thoughts might be quelled by actual annihilation of the philosophical “enemy.” To explore this, they recruited devout Christians for an experiment. They had these Christians read an actual news story about the “Muslimization of Nazareth”: The article described how Jesus’s birthplace had become largely a Muslim city, and how the dominant (and militant) Muslim population was marginalizing the Christians who remained.

The idea was that this unwelcome news about a holy Christian landmark would threaten the Christian readers’ worldview—and in turn their personal security. And indeed it appears it did. After they had read about Nazareth, they all took a psychological test that gauges preoccupation with thoughts of death and dying. As reported in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, those who had read the report were much more morbid in their imagery than those who had not. They were also much more derogatory toward Muslims than were Christians who had not read the news.

So that’s pretty unsettling in itself. But here’s where it gets really interesting. Hayes and his colleagues then told half of the participants another bit of news, only in this case it was made up. They told them that an airplane had crashed on its way to Nazareth, killing all 117 devout Muslims aboard. When they crunched the data, they found that those who had “witnessed” the annihilation of the Muslims were significantly less morbid in their thinking and significantly less derogatory toward Muslims. Put another way, knowing of the violent death of the Muslims effectively undid the perceived threat to the Christians’ philosophy and well-being. It restored meaning and security to their lives.

Isn't it possible that the plane crash simply made the Christians more sympathetic toward the Muslims, at least temporarily? The psychologists actually considered and rejected this idea, based on a surprising finding. The Christians who read about Nazareth became increasingly negative not only toward Muslims, but also toward Buddhists and Hindus and atheists. That is, they became antagonistic toward any worldview that questioned the absolute validity of Christianity. What's more, those who read the fabricated story about the plane crash were less disparaging of all these worldviews. Since no Hindus or Buddhists or atheists perished in the crash, there would be no reason for the Christians to feel sympathy toward these people.

So our brain fights death with death. It reasons that if an enemy dies, his philosophy must have been perverse or weak or just plain wrong, and thus no real threat to our superior worldview—nor to our life and limb. It’s a powerful psychological defense. In real life, of course, it just raises the ante. It’s tit for tat, and the new century starts counting its genocide victims.

*For a thorough examination of 20th century genocide, see Lewis Simons’s “Genocide and the Science of Proof” in the January 2006 issue of National Geographic magazine.

For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

Slicing the Economic Pie

By Wray Herbert

I grew up with a brother who was very close to me in age, and we were both hyper vigilant about getting our fair share. No matter what was at stake. That meant no more than our fair share of chores and responsibilities, and certainly no less than our fair share of privileges and rewards. My mother had all sorts of clever tricks for dealing with this constant competitiveness.If we were bickering over a last piece of pie, for example, she would randomly pick one of us to cut the slice of pie in half. But before the cutting started she would add: “And your brother gets to choose the slice he wants.”

Damn. With those few words, she took all the fun out of holding the knife, and indeed she probably shifted the competitive advantage. In any case, she made a muddle of self-interest and fairness in our young minds.

Well, it turns out my mother didn’t invent the pie-slicing gambit. But she was buying into a fairly cynical view of life, assuming that we all act like rational calculating machines, governed entirely by utilitarian self interest. But is this true? Is fairness simply a ruse, something we adopt only when we secretly see an advantage in it for ourselves? And do we expect no more than self-interest of others? Or is there such a thing as fairness for fairness’ sake?

Many psychologists have in recent years moved away from the purely utilitarian view, dismissing it as too simplistic. But the trick is in actually demonstrating genuine fairness in action, uncontaminated by self-serving motives like greed and need. Recent advances in both cognitive science and neuroscience now allow psychologists to approach this question in some different ways, and they are getting some intriguing results.

UCLA psychologist Golnaz Tabibnia and colleagues used a classic psychological test called the “ultimatum game" to explore fairness and self-interest in the laboratory. In this particular version of the test, Person A has a pot of money, say $23, which he can divide in any way he wants with Person B. All Person B can do is look at the offer and accept or reject it; there is no negotiation. If he walks away from the deal, there is no deal. In the actual experiment, there is no real Person A: It’s secretly the experimenter, making a range of offers, from generous to fair to stingy. The experimental subjects get to weigh the offers and respond.

Whatever Person A offers to Person B is an unearned windfall, even if it’s a miserly $5 out of $23, so a strict utilitarian would take the money and run. But that’s not exactly what happens in the laboratory. The UCLA scientists ran the experiment so sometimes $5 was stingy and other times fair, say $5 out of a total stake of $10. The idea was to make sure the subjects were responding to the fairness of the offer, not to the amount of the windfall. When they did this, and asked the subjects to rate themselves on a scale from happy to contemptuous, they had some interesting findings: Even when they stood to gain exactly the same dollar amount of free money, the subjects were much happier with the fair offers and much more disdainful of deals that were lopsided and self-centered. Indeed, many people actually reject very unfair deals, even though they are losing cash out of pocket, suggesting that their sense of decency is trumping their rational, calculating mind. They are responding emotionally to the idea that someone would hoodwink them.

That’s interesting in itself. But it could simply mean that we don’t like being treated shabbily, which wouldn’t be all that surprising. The psychologists want to know if, beyond that, there is something inherently rewarding about being treated decently. They decided to look inside the brains of these people to find out. They scanned several parts of their brains involved in aversion and reward while the subjects were in the act of weighing both fair and miserly offers, and they found that, yes, both parts of the brain light up during the ultimatum game. As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, the brain finds self-serving behavior emotionally unpleasant, but a different bundle of neurons also finds genuine fairness uplifting. What’s more, these emotional firings occur in brain structures that are fast and automatic, so it appears that the emotional brain is overruling the more deliberate, rational mind. Faced with a conflict, the brain’s default position is to demand a fair deal.

So unfairness is fundamentally jarring to the brain, and fairness is fundamentally rewarding. Yet people do accept offers every day in real life that are less than equitable, and indeed they did so in this experiment. When the scientists scanned the brains of those who were “swallowing their pride” for the sake of cash, the brain showed a distinctive pattern of neuronal firing. It appears
that the unconscious mind can temporarily damp down the brain’s contempt center, in effect allowing the rational, utilitarian brain to rule, at least momentarily. So it seems contempt does not go away when the economic pie is sliced unfairly, it just goes underground.



For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

Arranging For Serenity

By Wray Herbert

I am a New Age skeptic. I used to be a New Age cynic, so this shows just how far I have come in opening my mind to things I don’t understand. I no longer dismiss channeling and crystals and acupuncture as so much hocus-pocus, nor do I embrace these practices. I disinterestedly await proof.

I have to admit, though, that there is one New Age practice that has always had some intuitive appeal to me, and that’s feng shui. Feng shui is the ancient Chinese art of placement, and it’s based on the belief that space and distance and arrangement of objects can affect our emotions and our sense of well-being. This makes sense to me on a gut level: I know that I feel a greater sense of psychological equilibrium in some spaces than I do in others. I just don’t know why.

Psychologists have some ideas about this connection between physical space and thought and emotion, or what they call “psychological distance.” We’ve all had the sensation of being “too close” to a situation, needing to “get away” and “put some distance” between ourselves and others. Our sense of emotional connectedness (or lack of it) is tightly entangled with our perception of geography and patterns in space.

Two Yale psychologists decided to explore the power of these perceptions in the laboratory, to see if indeed an ordered and open space affects people’s emotions differently than a tighter, more closed-in environment. Put another way, do we automatically embody and “feel” things like crowding or spaciousness, clutter or order?

Lawrence Williams and John Bargh ran a series of experiments to test this out. All of the studies began with what’s called “priming”—the use of a cue to create an unconscious attitude or sensation. In this case, they used a very simple but well-tested technique: They had respondents graph two points, just as you would on an ordinary piece of graph paper. But for some the points were very close together (for example, 2 and 4 or -3 and -1), while for others they were far away (12 and 10, or -8 and -10). This simple exercise is known to bolster people’s unconscious feeling of either congestion or wide open spaces.

Then they tested the subjects in various ways. For example, in one study they had the participants read an embarrassing excerpt from a book, then asked them if the passage was enjoyable, or entertaining, whether they’d like to read more of the same, and so forth. They wanted to see if a sense of psychological distance or freedom might mute emotional discomfort, and that’s exactly what they found. Those who had been primed for spaciousness were less discomfited by the embarrassing experience; they found it much more enjoyable than did those with a pinched perception of the world.

The psychologists ran another version of the same experiment, except that the book excerpt was extremely violent rather than embarrassing. They got the same basic results. Those who had been primed for closeness found the violent events much more aversive—just as we find an airplane crash in our own neighborhood much more upsetting than a crash 3000 miles away. Williams and Bargh believe this has to do with the brain’s deep-wired connection between distance and safety, a habit of mind that likely evolved when our hominid forebears’ survival was a much more precarious matter.

The psychologists wanted to explore more directly this link between psychological distance and real peril, and they did so in an unusual way. As described in the March issue of Psychological Science, they primed the participants’ minds in the usual way, then had them estimate the number of calories in both healthy food and junkfood. Their reasoning was that the calories in French fries and chocolate are perceived as a health threat—emotionally dangerous--whereas the calories in brown rice and yogurt are not, so that people primed for closeness would be more sensitive to the threat. And that’s what they found: Those who had been made to feel crowded and closed in thought there were more calories in junkfood than did those feeling open and free. Their perceptions of healthy food were identical.

So that’s pretty convincing. But Williams and Bargh decided to run one more test, one when dealt head-on with the issue of personal security. They asked all the subjects about the strength of their emotional bonds to their parents, siblings and hometown, and found that those with greater psychological distance had weaker ties even to these important emotional anchors. Or put another way, they had more emotional detachment from the world.

What’s remarkable is that this all takes place unconsciously, out of awareness: The spatial distance between two arbitrary objects (in this case, two mere dots on a graph) is apparently powerful enough to activate an abstract symbol of distance and safety in the brain, which in turn is powerful enough to shape our responses to the world. It’s almost enough to make me move that vase a bit farther from the sofa, and just a bit closer to that lamp over there.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

"Hmmm, very interesting . . ."

By Wray Herbert

Some years ago I had a colleague who was a trove of American political trivia. He once asked me where I was from, and when I named my hometown in New Jersey, he proceeded to rattle off my home county’s population, ethnic makeup, economic base, recent election history, and the names and party affiliations of the region’s current power brokers. He knew way more than I knew about my own stamping ground.

That was the point. He was showing off. But even so it was dizzying how much detail he had stored in his head, about pretty much any county in the country. How did he do it? I mean, you couldn’t pay someone to memorize that volume of trivia. Well, the short answer is that what I’m calling trivia was anything but trivial to him. To the contrary, every red, blue and purple detail of the American political landscape was important, dynamic, and endlessly interesting to him.

But what does that mean exactly, that it was interesting to him? Is interest a universal emotion like fear or pride or bemusement? How does one person come to be fascinated by politics while others are equally entranced by baseball statistics or the early poems of Lord Byron? And if it’s possible to find such esoterica absorbing, why not trigonometry and irregular verbs? Can interest be nurtured and channeled in the classroom?

Scientists have shown surprisingly little interest in interest, given its obvious and fundamental connection to learning and education. That’s starting to change. In the past few years a handful of psychologists have started exploring interest in the laboratory, and they are starting to piece together a theory about this curious emotion.

One of the most striking features of interest is that it’s all over the map: One person’s passion for butterflies is another’s huge yawn, according to psychologist Paul Silvia, who has been exploring interest in his lab at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Interest also comes and goes; a book you found mesmerizing just a few years ago might leave you bored to tears if you tried to reread it today. Silvia has been trying to dissect this unpredictable mental state.

Much of his work involves exposing people to things in the real world that may or may not be interesting: contemporary poetry, abstract and classical artwork, and so forth. In one experiment, for example, he had people read an abstract poem, but some were given a small hint about the poem’s meaning while the others were left on their own. When asked later to rate the poem, those who had been given the hint found the work much more interesting. In a similar experiment, students who had studied a little about art history found a modern art gallery much more engaging than did students with no exposure to art.

Silvia thinks he knows what’s going on in these simple experiments. All of the people in these studies are appraising their experience, trying to make sense of it; that’s basic human nature, we make such appraisals all the time. But as he describes in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, they are sizing up the same experience very differently depending on the knowledge they bring to the event. All of them probably find the poem or artwork to be fresh, complex, mysterious—so they are at least curious enough to look more. That’s the first requirement for interest. But only some find the experience also to be comprehensible. That is, they have just enough knowledge that they believe they can “cope” intellectually with this complex and unexpected event; it’s not totally beyond their ken. The combination of complexity and comprehensibility adds up to genuine interest, and genuine interest cannot exist without both.

At its best, genuine interest becomes fascination becomes absorption becomes enrapture. Psychologists call such intensity "being in the flow,” a state of mind so focused that not even time can intrude on the experience. This sounds awfully like bliss to me, but Silvia is careful to distinguish even intense interest from happiness. Interest motivates people to explore, to seek out novelty, where happiness serves to firm up existing attachments—whether to a favorite restaurant or a favorite person.

Interest and happiness also have different sources, as Silvia showed in another experiment. He had people look at a variety of paintings, including serene landscapes by Claude Monet and the
rather disturbing images of Francis Bacon. The subjects rated both their interest in the paintings and their enjoyment, and then Silvia surveyed the range of their emotional reactions to the different works. The paintings that made people happy were simple, positive and calm. But they were consistently more intrigued by the works that they perceived as complicated, strange and upsetting. Interest, in short, requires emotional and mental challenge.

So how do we stay challenged once we have begun to master a topic? Why not just move on to something else and learn a little bit about a lot of things? Well, it appears that interest in self-propelling. Think of it this way: My former colleague has the entire American political landscape burned into his neurons, so he can now perceive subtleties and nuances and contrasts that are completely lost on the rest of us. So intellectual challenge motivates people to become experts, and expertise in turn allows them to stay interested in every new bit of knowledge, even if it’s just a meaningless election in some political backwater somewhere.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.