Riveted : the science of why jokes make us laugh, movies make us cry, and religion makes us feel one with the universe

318 Pages·2014·1.82 MB·English

by  Jim Davies

RIVETED
RIVETED
THE SCIENCE OF
WHY JOKES MAKE US LAUGH,
MOVIES MAKE US CRY, AND
RELIGION MAKES US FEEL
ONE WITH THE UNIVERSE
JIM DAVIES
RIVETED
Copyright © Jim Davies, 2014
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the U.S.—a division of St. Martin’s
Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave
Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number
785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and
representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom,
Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978-1-137-27901-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davies, Jim.
Riveted : the science of why jokes make us laugh, movies make us cry, and religion makes us feel
one with the universe / Jim Davies.
pages cm Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-137-27901-9 (hardback) 1. Evolutionary psychology. 2. Cognitive psychology. I.
Title.
BF698.95.D38 2014
155.7—dc23
2013050467
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Letra Libre, Inc.
First edition: August 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
CONTENTS
Introduction
1: Hardwiring for Socializing
2: Wizard’s First Rule: Hope and Fear’s Anti–Sweet Spot
3: The Thrill of Discovering Patterns
4: Incongruity: Absurdism, Mystery, and Puzzle
5: Our Biological Nature
6: Our Psychological Biases
7: Why We Get Riveted
More Sources of Interestingness
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
I n my first year of graduate school I worked in a condemned building. Sitting
in my office was a woman I was trying to impress. We were talking about
dance music. She liked club music and techno; I liked rap. I put on an acid
jazz album in the compact disc player.
“How can you dance to this?” she asked.
“How can you not dance to this?” I replied, and then demonstrated the
irresistibility of the track. For the most part, I only want to listen to music that
makes me want to dance. Sorry, John Denver.
When I was young I was fascinated with psychic powers. I read every book in
the libraries of both my elementary and high school on the subject, and was
convinced that people had untapped mental abilities. All these books in the
nonfiction section of my school’s library told me that people could move things
with their minds, scry with crystal balls, and predict the future. We used only 10
percent of our brains, right? What else could that 90 percent possibly be for?
I was absolutely captivated by this idea and convinced of it, until I read Susan
Blackmore’s sobering In Search of the Light: Adventures of a Parapsychologist
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in college. It was the first skeptical book I’d encountered and it scorched and
salted the lush landscape of my paranormal beliefs. First Santa Claus and now
this? Ideas can be beautiful and we don’t want to let go of them even when we
know they’re wrong.
There are things in this world that deeply resonate with us. We seek them out.
They hold our attention. They feel right. I want to dance to hip-hop. I feel moved
by sad, uplifting stories. I want to believe that people can move things just by
willing it to happen.
You are struck by a beautiful view from a mountain cabin. You hear that
everyone gets the afterlife that they imagined they’d have, and the idea is so
beautiful, and feels so right, that you smile in spite of yourself. You hear a story
of some terrible thing that happened to a child that gives you chills and haunts
you for days. You find yourself glued to the screen, watching a close basketball
game. You hear a great joke and can’t wait to tell it to your friends.
With the huge variety of things we find compelling, it seems natural that a
huge variety of qualities would make them compelling. There can’t be anything
similar about what’s good about a pop song on the radio and what’s moving
when someone recounts their near-death experience, can there?
Yes, there can. Strange as it might seem, compelling things share many
similarities. My purpose in this book is to tie together research from many fields.
I’ll do something that has never been done before and show how all these
phenomena can be explained with the foundations of compellingness. I will
show you that, like art and other sensory experiences, beliefs and explanations
have aesthetic qualities that make us more or less likely to believe them. The
same qualities appear again and again in riveting things, be they jokes, paintings,
quotations, paranormal beliefs, religions, sports, video games, news, music, or
gossip. The qualities that are common to all these things fit like a key in a lock
with our psychological proclivities. I call it the compellingness foundations
theory.
*
Understanding compellingness and how it works requires some understanding of
our brains and how they were shaped by evolution. Our brains are a mix of old
and newer processes that evolved at different times. They sometimes “disagree”
on the meaning, importance, and value of things, and often we are clueless as to
how we got our opinions. Often we are attracted to something or repelled by it
and don’t know why, and the reasons we dredge up are confabulations, mere
guesses about our underlying psychologies.
The old brain is evolutionarily older. It’s located near the top of the brain stem
and the back of the head. We share much of its anatomy with other animals. It’s
a Rube Goldberg contraption, with special rules for this and not for that, all
evolved, rather haphazardly, to help us survive and reproduce. It consists of a
hodgepodge of specialized systems.
In the front of our head is the new brain, which is a general-purpose learning
and reasoning machine and a system that tries to control the impulses of the
older brain. It’s a slow, deliberate planner and imaginer. Jazz improvisers quiet
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this part of their brain before performing. This part of the brain is not built to
do specific jobs; rather it’s built to learn to do, well, just about anything. Where
the old brain looks different depending on where you look, the new brain
(particularly the cerebral cortex), looks remarkably similar no matter where you
look. We have an old brain for the same reasons all animals do. We have the
new brain because our ancestors got into an intelligence arms race with each
other.
Because the old and new brains think with different rules, care about different
things, and might even use different stores of knowledge, they often come up
with different evaluations of the same situations. For example, there is a famous
moral-reasoning experiment run by psychologist Joshua Greene that asks
whether or not it is morally acceptable to pull a switch that will cause a train to
kill one person rather than five (this is a version of a problem first proposed by
Philippa Foot in 1967). Most people answer yes, such an action is acceptable,
which indicates relatively high activation in the newer, more frontal areas. More
emotionally salient problems, such as a version of the same problem that would
require the pushing of a single person onto a track to save five people, show
activation in the emotional, older parts of the brain. In this kind of scenario,
where there is direct physical contact involved, people often report that doing so
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is morally unacceptable.
When the new brain pulls in the opposite direction from the old, you can
literally be of two minds about something. For example, your new brain can
know that prepackaged cupcakes are unhealthful, but your old brain can be quite
insistent that they should be devoured. Many of them. With a cold glass of milk,
please. The old brain “knows” that sugar and fat are scarce and should always be
eaten when the opportunity arises. Thousands of years of evolution taught it that.
It doesn’t know that fat, sugar, and salt are now plentiful and contributing to an
obesity problem in the industrialized world. In contrast, the new brain knows
that too much sugar isn’t good for you. But who are you going to listen to?
(While we’re asking, who are “you?”)
The new brain knows things because it learned them. In this case, each one of
us has to learn things that run counter to what the old brain knows from
evolution. Such is the source of many internal mental conflicts. The old and new
have a tug of war. The new brain thinks more logically, in a step-by-step way.
The old brain is not deliberative; it is intuitive. Sometimes we can get a strong,
immediate sense that something is immoral. This is the old brain’s influence.
Then, when asked to explain it, we must engage our new brains, which struggle,
often unsuccessfully, to apply what we “believe” about morality to justify the
feeling. This is what moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt called “moral
dumbfounding.” Similarly, when choosing an immediate versus a delayed
reward, the emotional part of the brain—the old brain—is active when thinking
about the immediate reward, as are the frontal areas—the new brain—for the
delayed reward. It could be that because we have some control over the activity
of our frontal areas, we can use it to override the emotional areas when we need
to. The everyday term for this would be “resisting temptation.”
Because the old brain is better at context and the new brain better at rules,
there is evidence that people with low working memory (people who can’t
remember long strings of numbers, for example) are actually better at some tasks
that require old-brain function, particularly complex categorization tasks, as
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shown in a study by psychologist Maci DeCaro. The new brain uses its laser
focus to attend to only a few attributes of a situation. The old brain, in contrast,
has a more diffuse focus, giving lots of information more or less equal weight.
We often personally identify with the workings of our new brain. When we
see a scary monster depicted in a movie, we say we don’t “believe” that the
monster is there. However, as philosopher Tamar Szabó Gendler points out,
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some part of our brains must believe it’s there, or we wouldn’t get scared at all.
What does this have to do with compellingness? Often the evaluations by our
old brain make us prefer certain ideas and experiences. In general, its processes
are black boxes, inaccessible to consciousness.
Intuition can feel like a burst of insight that comes from nowhere. What is
really happening is that unconscious processes generate judgments and feelings
that bubble up to consciousness fully formed. For example, you might get a
feeling of danger or trust. You are aware of their outputs, but you can’t look
inside yourself to see how they work. If your mind is like an ocean, your
conscious mind is just the surface of the water. Because you don’t know what
causes these feelings in your own head, it can feel like divine intervention or
psychic ability.
We call these unconscious convictions and feelings intuition.
Should you trust your intuition? These unconscious processes either evolved
or were learned for some reason or another, and you often cannot tell in the
moment whether those reasons apply to your current situation. If you justify the
feeling with reasons, those reasons are a confabulation that your conscious mind
has invented.
It is not clear what the relationship is between trusting your intuition and
belief in the paranormal and in conspiracy theories. However, a study by
psychologist Matthew Boden showed that people who trust their hunches were
more likely to have “ideas of reference,” which are beliefs that things in the
world relate directly to them—such as that someone got on the elevator because
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they were in it or that the raindrops are trying to send them a message. Ideas of
reference are common symptoms of mental illnesses such as mania and
schizophrenia.