EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (5 page)

Consistently, these male monkeys had two favorite channels, preferring those showing pictures of high ranking individuals and close-ups of female derrieres. They preferred these over images of low ranking individuals, despite the fact that their preferred choice often cost them the opportunity to drink more juice.

Platt’s findings show that rhesus monkeys are motivated to acquire information about socially relevant situations, including information about dominance and sex. Their motivation and desire to obtain this information is high, as evidenced by the fact that they are willing to pay a cost — similar in important ways to the hens bashing open heavy doors to get chipped wood. Keeping an eye on a dominant is of value as dominants pose a threat, especially one staring at you. Keeping an eye on a female’s rear end is also of value as it can signal sexual receptivity: in rhesus monkeys, as in many other monkeys and apes, the area around the vagina either swells, turns red, or both when females are ovulating. This is important information for males, guiding their desire to court and mate with willing females.

Humans also value social information, devoting many hours in a day to gossiping and people-watching, whether in magazines, tabloids, reality TV, or real life. This information showcases what we have relative to others, a difference that will be exaggerated in societies with dominance hierarchies.

People living in hierarchical societies should relish information showing that a competitor has lost resources, whereas those living in egalitarian societies should be motivated to redress the imbalance. To test this possibility, the social psychologist Joan Chiao used survey information to establish two groups of individuals, one with preferences for hierarchical societies and the other with preferences for egalitarian societies. Chiao placed individuals from these two groups into a brain scanner and showed them pictures of people experiencing pain — an experience that often triggers empathy. Two areas, both associated with the personal experience of pain and the perception of pain in others, were highly active; this is the brain’s way of representing empathy. But these areas were less active in those who preferred hierarchies than those who preferred egalitarianism. This finding, as Chiao notes, is consistent with the idea that in an egalitarian society, empathy for others’ well-being is essential. In egalitarian societies, seeing someone who has less or is being harmed by another, should motivate a desire to redress the imbalance and reduce the harm. In a dog-eat-dog hierarchical society, where dominants outcompete subordinates and inequities are part of life, concern for those at the bottom is a sign of weakness.

Chiao interpreted her results as evidence that cultural influences can shape brain activity, leading some to develop a desire for dominance and inequities, whereas others develop a desire for equality. It is possible, however, that these individuals started out life with structural differences in brain anatomy and function, and these differences led some to prefer societies that champion inequalities while others prefer those that support equality. Chiao’s work can’t distinguish between these alternatives. Nonetheless, her studies nicely show that patterns of brain activation can heighten our sensitivity to what others have, what we desire, and how some of our desires can flexibly change in response to what others have. And if the addictive model I have been pushing is more broadly applicable to all of our desires, then our desire for status can turn into an unhinged drive for power that is difficult to satisfy.

I’ll have what she’s having

One of the most famous lines in movie history was delivered by Estelle Reiner in
When Harry Met Sally,
a comedy produced by her son Rob Reiner. While Estelle is seated at a table in a delicatessen, Sally — played by Meg Ryan — fakes having an orgasm to show Harry — played by Billy Crystal — that he can’t tell the difference between fakes and the real deal. Overhearing Ryan’s performance, Estelle turns to the waiter and says “I’ll have what she’s having.” This is comparison shopping, cashing in on someone else’s subjective experience to guide our chosen experiences.

Orgasms and eating are two of the most pleasurable experiences in life, whether you live in Tokyo, Toronto, Toulouse, Tehran or Timbuktu? I doubt any healthy human adult would debate this. What can be debated is what counts as the ultimate orgasm or food experience. It can be debated both among friends and inside our own minds, influenced by personal experience and our knowledge of what else is available, or might be. It is this comparative perspective that drives our desire for more, with the consequence, intended or incidental, that others have less. To nail this point, let me first step back to a particularly insightful study of food before stepping forward to studies of comparative shopping in the social market. Though food and social status are different commodities, the underlying psychology of comparison is remarkably similar.

Consider potato chips. As a snack, potato chips generate a revenue in the United States of about $6-7 billion dollars each year, relying on the slicing and frying of about 2 billion pounds of potatoes. These facts make clear that most Americans love potato chips, and are motivated to consume them. The social psychologist Carey Morewedge and his collaborators ran an experiment to find out how much people love potato chips, and whether their anticipated fondness for this delicious crisp changes in the face of other options
¹⁶
. Subjects sat at a table in front of a bowl of potato chips and an alternative food that was visible, but out of reach. The alternative was either a highly undesirable snack such as sardines, or a highly desirable one such as Godiva chocolate. After subjects contemplated what it would be like to eat each of these foods, they then rated how much they would enjoy them. This approach is like Sharot’s study that I described earlier where subjects rated how much they would enjoy different vacation destinations, but without the comparison between one clearly good and one clearly bad spot. Both studies focus on the anticipation of a pleasurable experience, as opposed to the actual experience of it.

Subjects’ ratings of potato chip pleasure soared when sardines were in view and plummeted when compared with chocolate. Context matters. What we unambiguously anticipate as a delicious experience when there is nothing else on the table, loses or gains in anticipated pleasure when the table fills up with other delectable or disgusting alternatives.

What’s happening to our pleasure detector in the potato chip experiment and especially our anticipation of reward? Are we incapable of understanding what makes us happy, unable to figure out what is or is not delicious? Or are we fickle? What Morewedge’s experiment suggests is that deliciousness, like ugliness, stubbornness, and obsequiousness, is a judgment, judgments are always relative or comparative, and as such, based on some standard that is either present in the moment, stored away in our memories, or anticipated in the future. When Estelle Reiner uttered her famous line, she was using Meg Ryan’s orgasmic expression of delight as a comparative metric. When we compare food, wine, pretty faces, sporty cars or land that our neighbor controls, we recruit our brain’s resources, especially the circuitry involved in attention, emotion and memory. Whether we say that potato chips are the best snack, or better than sardines, we have made a comparison that requires our attention, our capacity to keep at least two items in memory, and a way of emotionally tagging each of the items — one yum, one yuck. This comparison-shopping taxes our mental resources, recruiting them away from the job of evaluating one snack, and leading to a distorted evaluation of desirability or worth.

Morewedge’s experiments point to a mismatch between how delicious something is and how delicious we think it will be, or how delicious we thought it was. It reveals a distortion in our capacity to anticipate — or
forecast
in the words of social psychologist Daniel Gilbert — how we will feel, and in particular, how much we will like the experience. This represents a kink in the psychology of desire: we expect the system that links wanting and liking to be well honed so that we end up really wanting things we really like. This distortion arises not only in the context of eating, but in a variety of other contexts including the social world.

Consider revenge. When someone transgresses over the border of social norms, either harming us or those we care about, we often seek revenge, motivated to even things up. We often imagine that revenge will make us feel better, providing a honey hit to the brain that will satisfy our desire to redress an imbalance. In brain terms, this honey hit would be expressed as dopamine given the essential role that this chemical plays in the anticipation of reward. But do we consistently experience this feeling of reward when we follow through on a plot of revenge or, as Sir Frances Bacon noted over three hundred years ago, might “A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.”
¹⁷
Might our desire for revenge inoculate us against healing, creating an illusion that we will feel better? If so, revenge is like addiction, with wanting unhinged from liking.

To understand how revenge works, the social psychologist Kevin Carlsmith set up an experimental game, allowing each subject within a group to contribute money to a public good.
¹⁸
At the end of one round of contributions, the bank (an experimenter distributing the money) multiplied the total contribution by a pre-determined amount, divided this total by the number of players, and then redistributed this amount to each player. In this game, if each player contributes to the common pot, everyone comes out with the highest returns. However, the best strategy for an individual is to cheat, holding on to the initial endowment while reaping the rewards of everyone else’s generous contributions. Those who opt out of cooperation in a public good situation stand to benefit, especially if there are no punitive consequences. In Carlsmith’s set up, some could pay to punish, some witnessed the consequence of another’s punitive act, and some played in a game with no punishment.

When given the opportunity to punish the cheater, most people punished. Everyone, both punishers and non-punishers alike, expected punishment to feel good. They were wrong. Both punishers and those who witnessed punishment felt worse, with the act of punishment compounding the bad feelings. The fact that the witnesses felt worse, as opposed to better, may seem at odds with our experience of schadenfreude, of enjoying another’s misery. Shouldn’t the witnesses have rejoiced upon discovering that the offenders were slapped with a punitive fine? In our own personal experience with schadenfreude, as well as in studies that I will soon discuss, people rejoice over someone else’s misfortune but this news has no direct bearing on them. In Carlsmith’s experiments, the witnesses learn of a misfortune, but the offender’s defection directly harms the witness in terms of money lost. These results suggest that although punishment may feel good, this benefit may not make up for the lost income.

Everyone in Carlsmith’s experiments also believed that punishment would cause people to think less about the offender, flushing the bad thoughts from their memories. They were wrong again. Punishers, but not those who simply witnessed punishment, ruminated more about the selfish offenders. Rumination led to more bad feelings. These bad feelings led to more rumination, giving birth to a vicious cycle of feeling bad and ruminating about those who cheated them of some money. Rumination also affected the level of punishment: those who ruminated more, and felt worse about it, also punished more heavily. Rumination heightened the comparative difference in resources. Rumination focused attention on the wrongdoer, akin to a police investigation with a spotlight beamed on to the criminal’s face. Rumination caused the ruminator to think more about what he didn’t have, and how he was cheated. Rumination maintained the bad feelings in memory.

Carlsmith’s findings are paradoxical and disturbing. Paradoxically, they suggest that in some situations, our expectations about the feeling of punishing an immoral act are inverted from the feelings we feel following punishment: rather than feeling a happy high, we feel a depressing low, often accompanied by increasing anger. In the context of punishing a free-rider who stiffed the group, everyone expects to feel good, but many end up feeling angry instead. The entire polarity of the emotion has switched, with rumination and anger dominating our thoughts. Like Morewedge’s study of food, our anticipation of pleasure is also distorted for revenge. This is a dangerous state to enter. Faced with the strong belief and desire that revenge should feel good, but lacking any confirmation, we are moved to find new evidence and as shown in other experiments by Carlsmith, to dole out more punishment to satisfy the feeling of just deserts, the feeling that the punishment fits the crime. With anger at the helm, there is one highly probable outcome: the delivery of increasingly severe levels of punishment, driven by the desire to feel good about retribution. This is precisely the pattern I described above for obesity: the wanting system continues to search for liking and reward, but fails and thus continues its search. Whether it is an unsatisfied desire for food or revenge, the unfortunate consequence is an escalation to excess, fueled by a failure to obtain what we want.

The great leveler

We are often envious of those who have what we desire, whether it is good looks, money, a warm supportive family, or a better tennis stroke. Envy, an emotion that is anchored in comparison shopping, motivates us to change our looks, find careers that will improve our finances, seek relationships that will provide additional support, and pick up a few extra tennis lessons to win the next match. Unfortunately, envy can quickly turn malignant, as desire and a deep sense of inferiority about our personal deficiencies transform into insatiable cravings to acquire whatever is necessary to gain superiority. Envy thus wears two masks, at times motivating self-improvement, at others destructive toward those who have more. Envy attempts to level the playing field, taking from the Haves to deliver unto the Have-Nots.