Photo by Jamie Campbell

One of the most important reasons that we love entertainment such as dramatic movies and sports events is that they are suspenseful. If one football team leads another by 63 points in the third quarter, most spectators will lose interest in the contest, because there is no suspense about the outcome. Likewise, a dramatic movie has to make us wonder about the fate of the hero; without such suspense we will experience the movie as flat and boring.

This leads to an obvious question that, strangely enough, is rarely asked: Why the heck should we find such pleasure in not knowing how things are going to turn out? Generally speaking, don’t we prefer security and understanding to insecurity and uncertainty? Why do we so enjoy putting ourselves in situations in which we feel anxiety about the outcome?

The first clue to the answer here is that we don’t really put ourselves in such situations, because the circumstances that produce suspense are always in some sense imaginary or fictional. We can feel suspense about the outcome of a game, even if we are playing in it ourselves, but we don’t say that we feel suspense about whether the boss is going to fire us in the meeting later this morning (Our feelings in this case are more likely to be anxiety and uncertainty). So it must be something about experiencing uncertainty in an imaginary situation that is the basis for the pleasure of suspense.

Some authors have concluded that since the situation in a fiction (like a movie or a book) or a game is imaginary, the emotions we feel themselves have an imaginary quality, and that is why we can enjoy what would otherwise be an unpleasant emotion, such as anxiety or uncertainty. The problem with this position, among other things, is that it is difficult to understand what an imaginary emotion is, and how it could be clearly distinguished from a real emotion.

There’s a simple solution to this problem: As any anxiety sufferer will tell you, it is completely possible to generate very real emotions just by thinking about certain situations, you don’t have to actually be in those situations. The limbic system, the part of the brain that produces the basic feeling of anxiety, reacts to thoughts that the more advanced parts of the brain can recognize as imaginary.

So this is at least part of the answer to our question. Suspense is real emotion that is provoked by a situation that we recognize as not real. Because we recognize that the situation is not real, we can allow ourselves to feel enough of the anxiety to feel stimulated, but then control that anxiety by reminding ourselves that the situation is imaginary.

But there is another part of the question—why should that be so much fun? I can’t say that I know the answer the answer to that one, but I have a guess: Conscious human beings can’t avoid at least occasionally confronting the fact that the future is uncertain and that in fact the current moment could be their last. We love stories and other situations that have happy endings because they provide a sense of relief. They give us hope that the uncertainty and anxiety we often feel may be simply temporary, and in the end everything will work out just fine.

One of the puzzles faced by those who think about human evolution and our relationship to non-human primates is this: If we look at the social organizations of our closest relatives, the great apes, they are typically marked by strong dominance hierarchies. This is especially clear with our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. They live in groups in which dominant males rule the roost and monopolize access to breeding females and other goodies such as choice foods.

The puzzle—which has been raised by anthropologist Bruce Knauft and others—is this: If dominance and submission are built into our genetic code, why is it that early social groups of homo sapiens were (as it is widely agreed) egalitarian? How in the world could early humans have overcome their deeply rooted instincts for dominance and submission and begun to treat each other more or less as equals?

The anthropologist Robert A. Paul has recently suggested an answer to this question, based on one of Sigmund Freud’s more controversial theories. And of course, since many now regard Freud’s theories as little more than speculation, you have to know that his more controversial proposals don’t have a big following these days. Nevertheless, Paul does a good job of defending Freud’s thesis of “the primal crime.”

Freud asserted, in his book Totem and Taboo, that truly human creatures were born in rebellions led by groups of junior males in proto-human groups (still ruled by an alpha male). These junior males banded together to kill the dominant males in their groups, and having done so became free to mate with the heretofore inaccessible females of the group. However—according to Freud’s theory—these junior males were also likely to then feel guilty about what they had done. Thus the characteristic result of these rebellions was that the group of males instituted some new rules aimed at minimizing both aggression and mating within the residential group, and in so doing created the first fully human social groups.

Paul argues that, with some relatively minor modifications, this scenario is quite compatible with recent understandings of human evolution. First of all, evolving tool and weapon technology would indeed have made it difficult to sustain chimpanzee-style dominance in proto human groups, because weapons are equalizers. As an organization based on such dominance became less workable, something was needed to take its place. Human communities are indeed always based on powerful cultural mechanisms that sustain a certain level of peace and cooperation. These mechanisms include ostracism and ridicule, the moral rules of religions, and the range of probably uniquely human emotions such as guilt and shame that help keep us in line.

However, these powerful mechanisms do not erase our biological heritage, so that we retain strong tendencies to try and dominate, to be willing to submit. Thus our history—especially in the last 10,000 years or so—provides plenty of good examples of the re-emergence of brutal competition and hierarchical groups following dominant leaders.

This argument is interesting because it provides a fresh perspective on the age-old question of the dual character of human nature: Are we competitive or cooperative, peace-loving or warlike, democratic or authoritarian? The answer is that being human is precisely a matter of having tendencies, based in both biology and culture, that lead us to be all these things at the same time. When you look at the world today, this makes a certain amount of sense.

Photograph provided on flickr by Threepin.  No animals were armed in the production of this picture.

Photo by Johnny Henriksen

A recent (and widely commented on)  CNN.com article reports that some viewers of the film Avatar are so desperate to occupy the fantasy world of the film that the thought of having to return to day-to-day reality here on earth leaves them depressed or even suicidal. “When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning,” wrote one young man on a fan forum.

This may sound somewhat extreme, but this is simply an example of a common phenomenon I call “getting caught up” and which a number of psychologists have studied under the label “narrative transport.” The fact is that it’s fairly normal for human beings, at least in our society, to become so immersed in stories that we feel like we are actually there. And if we really like the story we become caught up in, we don’t want to leave it—as when you don’t want to put down a book you’re reading, or don’t want it to end.

The work of developmental psychologist Paul Harris helps us to understand why human beings are so likely to become caught up in stories. By the age of two, children’s play includes complex pretend episodes that are based on imagining what some situation—such as being a firefighter or a princess—would be like. In other words, even very young children can project themselves into an imaginary situation and proceed to consistently think and talk from that situation, keeping it separate from the real world. They don’t have to plan this, they just take off and go.

Michael Tomasello’s work on the differences between cognition among non-human primates and humans provides a compelling explanation for this remarkable ability. Tomasello attributes much of the difference between the mental abilities of humans and our closest relatives to our unique ability to put ourselves “in the mental shoes” of others and easily grasp what they are up to. This cognitive ability to adopt other perspectives is what makes elaborate pretend play so easy even before our brains are fully developed. And it is also what makes it possible for adults to plunge themselves into a fiction so deeply that—for awhile—it seems and feels like the fiction is real.

For better or for worse, we live in a society in which the capacity for becoming caught up in fictions like movies, television, novels (as well as games like sports contests) is a fundamental part of our way of life. The joys of becoming caught up in entertainment are a big part of what many of us live for. In this sense, we are like those of firm religious faith who believe that a genuine paradise awaits them, except that we don’t even have to die to get there.

So, when we read about weird people who don’t want to come back to this world after visiting the vivid reality of another, we might want to consider if they are really so weird. I suspect that most of us have had the same experience at some point.

Photo by Michelle Jones

Americans typically take it for granted that their behavior reflects their own decisions about what to do. Holidays provide many clear examples to the contrary. On New Year’s Eve there’s a very good chance that you will attend a party, that you will stay up until midnight and make noise at that time, and there is a fairly good chance you will drink too much alcohol. If you think this is simply a reflection of your own individual decisions, you need to explain how millions of others happened to make exactly the same individual decisions at the same time.

We do these things because they are traditions, and that implies that we don’t necessarily think very carefully about why we are doing them. So, quickly now, why exactly does the beginning of a new year require that you stay up and experience it and that you get excited, perhaps with the aid of a mind-altering substance?

Americans, of course, are not the only ones who observe these traditions. Throughout history, people have celebrated transitional holidays with parties, noise-makers, and drugs. By transitional holidays I mean times that mark important transitions in the calendar, such as New Year’s Eve, Halloween (New Year’s Eve in the pre-Christian European calendar) or Mardi Gras (held on the transition to the Christian season of Lent).

As I pointed out in an earlier post, transitions of all sorts are often marked with rituals. Think for example of initiation ceremonies in which a person goes through a transition from one sort of being to another. Anthropologists have shown that transitions are ritualized because they represent a point of tangency with the unknown. All human beings have classification systems that divide experience into classes and categories: types of people, types of animals, times of the year, and so on. When one sort of thing—say, 2009—turns into another sort of thing—say 2010—there must be a moment that is between the two and is nothing at all. “Nothing at all” is strange and potentially a little scary, because it could draw our attention to the fact that really all of the order we have imposed on the universe is our own creation.

Thus people have developed traditions to deal with those moments of time that are outside the normal order of things. They gather together both to pay homage to and to ward off the powers that dwell out there in the dark. Raucous gatherings at these points can serve many purposes: distraction from uncertainty, celebration of successfully negotiating the danger, flirting with the powers of the unknown, to name a few. Is there any problem with following age-old traditions without really thinking about why we do them? Not really; in my view this is one way we express our kinship with other human beings everywhere. Although now that we are armed with automobiles it’s probably best to re-think the drinking too much thing.

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…

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?

Photo by Urijamjari

In my previous post I said that the fact that entertainment is a form of play doesn’t mean it’s not serious. On the contrary, our play—like our rituals—often forms part of the very basis of our social life by cementing emotional commitments to key cultural principles and values. In entertainment, this is accomplished in large part through experiences of which we are all aware but that we seem oddly uncurious about.

We all are familiar with the possibility of becoming “caught up” in a book, a game, or a movie. Caught in Play argues that these experiences of losing ourselves in entertainment activities are not just oddities but rather central to our way of life, for they are moments when we briefly live in the world of our dreams. When we become caught up in one of the many fictions that surround us, we momentarily forget the mundane world of our day-to-day existence and escape into the realm of entertainment, the realm of adventure, romantic passion and glamour.

The joy of stepping outside the self

Recent research in psychology and neuroscience helps us to better understand these experiences and their effects on us. It is especially important to understand that in becoming caught up in the fantasies of entertainment, we are likely to experience powerful changes in our sense of authorship of our own actions. Much of the reason that we enjoy becoming caught up is that we feel pulled along by the activity we have undertaken. This slightly out of control feeling is exciting and stimulating.

These powerful bodily experiences turn out to have some interesting consequences. In particular, they continue to shape our desires when we return to the drudgery of the day to day. The world of entertainment is in fact the means whereby a society that must demand discipline and hard work maintains an alternative set of values stressing self-indulgence and leisure. It all works out very neatly, except for the fact that this situation leaves some baffling mysteries in its wake, mysteries that turn out to have a considerable impact on our personal lives. Take, as an example, the question of addiction–the topic of  my next post.