Photo by Dennis Crowley

Unless you have alienated everyone around you, in the next two months you are likely to be invited to at least one party. If you take the perspective of a visitor from outer space, parties are actually sort of weird: “The humans gather in groups and consume food and other substances that make them dizzy. Using special equipment designed to produce loud sounds, they begin to hop around and become quite excited. Sometimes they even initiate their mating practices.”

I was recently interviewed for a magazine article about parties, and as I talked I realized how much recent research on imitation can help us understand about these odd behaviors. Survival among our non-human primate ancestors was tied to effective means of coordinating and sustaining social groups with increasingly flexible and complex means of adapting to their environments. One of the most effective means of coordinating groups is imitation, because it promotes group solidarity and allows for rapid learning.

We now know that there is a system of “mirror neurons” probably present in all primates, but highly developed in humans. These specialized neurons fire both when we perform certain kinds of actions and when we observe others performing them. This means, for one thing, that we automatically imitate others much of the time, and the only reason we don’t walk around imitating constantly is that we also learn, as we grow, to inhibit many of our neural impulses to imitate. Nevertheless, and this is the key point for parties, we still imitate others all the time, often without knowing we do so.

Thus, research has shown that if you are engaged in a lively conversation with someone, you will closely imitate their facial expressions. This will have two more or less inevitable consequences: so long as you sustain a lively conversation, you and your partner will tend to like one another. (In support of these points, see the articles and comments by Ap Dijksterhuis in Perspectives on Imitation) Second, you and your partner will begin to share emotions, because it has also been shown repeatedly that emotions are triggered by associated facial expressions. As you know, a lively conversation can be very stimulating, even exciting: this is why.

Suppose you are in a setting where several small groups are having lively conversations. These folks are enjoying themselves and laughing. You are imitating those you are in conversation with, enjoying yourself, and feeling the happiness even of the other conversational groups. You are laughing and speaking excitedly—others hear this, and in turn they become more aroused and excited.

This emotional contagion may sound odd (aren’t emotions supposed to well up from within our innermost selves?), but in fact it’s an everyday sort of thing. An example I sometimes use to convey this to students: I ask them if they have ever been with a group of friends talking, and they have laughed so hard they felt they couldn’t stop. Virtually everyone says they have had this experience. Now, I say, have you ever felt that way just sitting by yourself, not reading or watching a movie, when you just think of something funny? No one has ever claimed such an experience. The point is that we are usually capable of much more intense emotions in groups than as individuals.

Now of course, parties aren’t just about conversations. There can be music, dancing, drinking, etc. But notice that all of these things also can lead to high arousal levels, even what might be called altered states of consciousness. Drums have been used since time immemorial to stimulate trance—we are highly susceptible to regularly repeated rhythms. Further, a lot of what happens with rhythm and dance is physical entrainment, a process that is closely related to imitation. Entrainment is another elemental motor process, deeply embedded in our evolutionary history, and it has been shown that infants who are but a few hours old will begin to synchronize bodily movements with their caretakers.

What does all this add up to? Intense collective celebrations have served important social functions for millions of years, even before our ancestors became human beings. At such events we find ourselves feeling emotions that we are not used to, we experience levels of arousal not familiar from day to day life, and we find ourselves doing things that we haven’t really fully intended to do. This is why parties can be so much fun. They can be so stimulating that normal conventions of comportment may seem unnecessary or irrelevant, and at a really good party, people can get pretty crazy. Not you or me, of course, but those other humans…

Photo by Patrick Byrne

Usually we regard entertainment such as TV, movies, and novels as leisure time activities, enjoyable but not terribly important. I think this is incorrect; my view is that entertainment experiences are both powerful and consequential. In part, this is because entertainment engages the strong tendency for members of our species to imitate what we see and imagine.

When we use the word “imitation” in everyday speech we are referring to one person doing the same thing as someone else. I’m speaking about humans here, but in fact many animals imitate one another in this sense. For example, a whole flock of birds may take to the skies when one does so.

Recently scientists from a number of different disciplines have made great strides in understanding imitation. There is now general agreement that there is a level of imitation that goes beyond “doing what someone else is doing.” In full imitation, A understands that B is a being like A who is pursuing a goal, and since A has a similar goal, A does what B is doing. It may be that only humans are capable of imitation in this sense, although some would assert that there are some other mammals that can do this. That’s not the point here, however.

The point is rather that many cognitive scientists argue that this sort of imitation is the foundation of human cooperation in social groups. Humans can understand what other humans are up to and can thus join in with them on a wide range of complex projects. Perhaps the single most important of these projects is language, but there are a lot of others—hunting and warfare, roads and pottery, economic and legal systems, you get the picture.

This perspective on imitation can help us to understand how entertainment works on us. We are wired to imitate what we see, even what we imagine, and to easily adopt the perspective of others; in fact, we will do so automatically before we learn the skills of inhibiting such responses . Thus, to take a single example, when you watch a romantic movie, you will automatically tend to imitate the facial expressions of the actors on the screen, and as a result you may begin to feel—really feel—the emotions of tenderness or passion or frustration that are being skillfully portrayed. The goal of the actors becomes your goal—you are desperate for the couple to get together (or in an action movie, you really want the bad guy to get what’s coming to him).

The result? Well, the obvious one is that this is an enjoyable experience, because even though we never lose track of the fact that it’s a story, it feels real. In fact, it’s so enjoyable that we will shell out good money to climb on this ride. But there is also another, less obvious, result. The experience we construct as we join into the film through our imitative capacities leaves us with a memory of some very powerful and pleasant feelings. These feelings can become an emotional standard for us, against which we judge our experiences in the real world. We know that romantic movies aren’t real, but we may still bring emotional expectations from these movies into our real relationships. And this is one reason that many can’t shake the feeling that their real-world relationships are flawed, that there is something better out there somewhere…

Photo by Sharon Mollerus

I have done a few media interviews in connection with Caught in Play, and at times I have been pressed to offer a judgment on whether the entertainment that is prominent in our culture is a good or a bad thing. I resist making such judgments, in part because that’s not my job. As a social scientist, my task is to study entertainment, not to pass moral judgments. In addition, it seems to me that the category of entertainment is too broad to be judged good or bad. Entertainment is like the weather—sometimes good, sometimes bad. But nobody makes a global judgment of weather like “weather is bad.” I don’t think global judgments of entertainment make much sense either.

That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to generalize about the effects of entertainment on our lives. For example, we should be aware that participating in any sort of entertainment is a form of discipline. It seems odd to say this—watching TV doesn’t seem like discipline at all. That’s because we usually use discipline to refer to rigorous training, and sitting in front of a television does not seem like training at all, much less rigorous training. But our word discipline is derived from disciple, which as you may know means “follower.” To participate in entertainment like novels or movies or TV, you have to follow what is going on. You must become a disciple, a follower of the entertainment.

Those who have followed a course of rigorous training—to master a profession or a sport or a skill such as carpentry, for example—will probably be able to describe the payoff of this sort of discipline. Rigorous training makes demands, and because of that the person who goes through it is changed, something is added to the self. The disciple follows the tradition, and whether the tradition is becoming a physician or a member of a religion, the disciple is transformed.

The discipline of entertainment is not rigorous, it is fun; that’s why it is entertainment. But that does not mean we do not follow it. Entertainment can take us to relaxation and to pleasurable experiences, and it too will transform those who engage in it. Virtually everyone (including me) enjoys some entertainment. But some disciples of entertainment—like some followers of religion—become fanatics. When talking about entertainment, we use a shortened version of the word: fan. There are always some dangers with fanaticism.

At the end of the day, what people want to do with their lives is none of my business, and not something I have anything to say about. But I do feel comfortable saying this: What you follow is a pretty good guide to where you will end up.

By Sabrina Campagna

Sociologists studying love and marriage report a finding that you probably won’t find surprising: people don’t describe their marriages as the “happily ever after” bliss suggested in our romantic stories and movies.

Most people say that no matter how romantic the relationship felt when they were dating, marriage isn’t the achievement of perfection. Rather, marriage itself requires hard work, compromises, working on a friendship, etc. etc. And come to think of it, our romantic stories aren’t about long term relationships like marriages at all, they are about people in the early stages of getting to know one another. Think about the iconic romance, “Sleepless in Seattle” in which the couple doesn’t even meet until the movie’s final scene.

So why do so many people continue to hope for a blissfully romantic relationship even though they “know” it’s not a possibility? And this isn’t just a matter of day-dreaming. I’m sure you can think of people who broke up their families because they “fell in love” with someone else, only to have that new relationship eventually disappear (or else morph into a real marriage like the one they left in the first place).

One possible answer to the question of why people pursue perfect romance when they know it doesn’t exist has to do with the incredible popularity of our romantic stories. Last time I checked romance novels accounted for about half of all books sold in any given year. As I have pointed out before, we human beings are really adept at projecting ourselves into stories, so that as we become caught up in a story we actually think and feel from the fictional perspective. Our ability to do this is based in no small part on the imitative capacities that are built into our brains: we can even imitate imaginary situations and easily experience what it is like to see and feel the world from that situation. Maybe a story is not a real relationship, but for a few hours it can come close to feeling like it’s real.

So even if you recognize that eternal romantic passion isn’t really an earthly possibility, you can still experience it by getting caught up in romantic stories. This puts your mind in the interesting position of having a belief (happily ever after doesn’t really happen) that is contradicted by experience. This is probably why many of the same people who explicitly say that real relationships never work out this way continue to describe an ideal relationship as a happily ever after romance.

And that surely bears on the question I started out with. People continue to hope for and try to realize perfect romantic relationships in spite of the fact that they don’t see such relationships as possible. It kind of makes you respect the power of a story.

Abstract/photo by Frank Bonilla

Why do we love entertainment—celebrities, TV, music, etc., etc.—so much? Stupid question, right? We love it because it’s entertaining! So let me re-phrase: why are celebrities, TV, music, etc. etc. so entertaining that many people spend almost every available hour engaged with them?

The answer turns out to be similar to the question of why we love food that is laden with salt and fat: entertainment taps into aspects of our evolutionarily conditioned mental and emotional heritage. Contemporary entertainment builds upon some very powerful built-in human neural processes, and as a result it’s sort of a Big Mac for the brain.

That doesn’t mean that 25,000 years ago our ancestors were sitting around the fire and thinking, “this is really boring, I wish we had a flat screen TV.” But it’s a pretty good guess that they were telling stories. After all, no anthropologist I know of has ever claimed to observe a human culture that doesn’t value narratives of various sorts. Recent work in areas such as cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology goes a long way toward explaining why this is so.

The key to understanding the human lust for stories is to grasp the importance of imitation in our social and cognitive processes. We sometimes think of imitation as a rather low-level mental ability (“monkey see, monkey do”) but true imitative behavior is highly complex and is probably limited to our species. True imitation entails not only doing what somebody else does, it also means understanding what that somebody else is up to.

Psychologist Michael Tomasello and others have suggested that our virtually automatic capacity–perhaps based on mirror neuron systems in our brains–to quickly grasp what other people are doing is the single most significant evolutionary advance that separates us from other primates. It is this that enables us to cooperate with others in building human culture and language.

Our easy ability to grasp perspectives other than our own is also what makes it so easy for us to enter into an imaginative situation such as a story. And we really do enter into stories. As developmental psychologist Paul Harris has pointed out, the imitative capacities of our minds enable us to almost completely occupy a fictional position, so that both our thoughts and feelings begin to be shaped more by the fiction than by our real-life situation. We feel that we are there, in the story, an experience that psychologist Melanie Green and her colleagues call “narrative transport.”

Jump ahead 25,000 years now to a world in which there are 3D movies and surround sound and computer enhanced imagery, all sorts of technologies that enable us to plunge deeper into our beloved fictions. It’s like a powerful, mind altering drug, except that it’s legal and completely safe. No wonder entertainment is so entertaining.

Photo by Bandita

Here’s a headline from MSNBC.com the other day: “Health reform idea: Put down the doughnut.” Largely missing from the health care debate, says the author, is a discussion of the role of personal choice in creating health problems such as obesity. Some people wonder why their tax dollars should be used to care for people who are ruining their own health by eating too much.

In contrast, a few days earlier Ellen Goodman had written an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe arguing that the nation’s obesity problem has something to do with the way food is marketed. The food industry has invested billions in advertising and food processing techniques in order to make food irresistible, and Goodman opined that this just might have something to do with why so many people eat too much. A lot of Goodman’s readers seemed to incline more toward the “personal responsibility” explanation; several of them combined this view with the opinion that Goodman was a sicko commie witch for even suggesting that the food industry bears some responsibility in this issue.

From my perspective, this debate is never going to get past the shouting stage until we recognize that some of our ethical concepts—in particular the way we think about intentional behavior and responsibility—have not kept up with the research on why people act the way they do. Morally, we are stuck in the Middle Ages, with assumptions like “except for reflexes, people’s actions are intentional and voluntary.” In this view, almost everything sane people do is the result of conscious decisions to act.

There is by now overwhelming evidence, from fields such as social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, demonstrating that this is flat wrong. In fact, most of what we do is orchestrated by mental processes that never reach full consciousness: deeply ingrained habits, unconscious cognitive schemata and stereotypes, and so on. My own work in this area has been especially concerned with the role of imitation: human beings are imitation machines. To take a single example, a person will closely imitate the facial expressions of a conversational partner, without any intention or even awareness that he or she is doing so.

That point has enormous implications for understanding the efficacy of advertising. Social psychologist John Bargh and his colleagues have done a number of relevant studies here; a recent paper shows that watching people eat increases eating behavior in viewers. As I argue in Caught in Play, imitation is also central for understanding the effects of our participation in entertainment more broadly. Entertainment is another domain in which automatic mental processes shape our values and behavior.

So, what’s the point? Simply this: I have no argument with those who urge consumers to be responsible. People who eat too much need to take responsibility for that. But we now know that eating behavior—to stick with this example—can be powerfully encouraged by mental processes that occur outside of conscious awareness. Who is responsible for that? Isn’t it the people who intentionally design advertising and food processing to generate over-consumption? If you demand that consumers be responsible, why not be consistent and demand that the industries promoting consumption be responsible as well?