As those who have read this blog in the past know, I consider entertainment to be very important in our culture. It’s important because much of what people want to do comes down to being entertained—watching TV, movies, and sports, playing games, amusing themselves online, going out to eat, drink, and party, etc., etc. In that sense, although we are unlikely to put it in this way, entertainment seems to operate for many of us as the very purpose of life.

Entertainment is also important because our lust to be entertained infects many areas of life that aren’t in themselves entertaining—we want our food and our cars and our politicians and our classes and our friends to be entertaining, just for starters. The result is that certain kinds of products and activities—for example, an honest and competent, but ugly and boring politician—tend to disappear.

In a number of recent posts, I have been trying to point out another aspect of the importance of entertainment—entertainment can only flourish in a particular sort of cultural environment. Whether it’s a strange coincidence or not, the mass entertainments of the turn of the 20th century (motion pictures, followed by radio and TV) were accompanied by new ways of thinking about people and values. At this time there was a growing emphasis on the importance of people being amusing and being able to create a good first impression, and there emerged a new flexibility about moral values. Above all, this is the period when it began to be widely accepted that the possibilities of fulfillment and self-realization opened up life’s most important quests. And what better way to find fulfillment than in entertaining activities and the acquisition of the flood of consumer goods that was starting to appear around this time?

I don’t claim that entertainment caused all these things, but I do claim that they all emerged in our culture at roughly the same time—around the turn of the 20th century. As I pointed out last time, that’s also the time period in which an increasingly vocal protest started to emerge against this culture of entertainment, a protest that usually took the form of religious fundamentalism.

So, what’s the point? Is entertainment good or bad? The point has nothing to do with entertainment being good or bad. Sure, there are social problems that are associated with entertainment; here are a few possibilities that come immediately to mind: childhood obesity, addiction, political polarization, widespread boredom. I’ve discussed all of these in this space.

But there are lots of good things associated with entertainment as well: tolerance of diversity, effective communication, and–can’t forget this–it’s fun. In the end, the point isn’t to pass judgment on our culture of entertainment, it’s to better understand that culture. Because we are more likely to be able to control what we understand. And what we don’t understand is more likely to control us.

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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?

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We have a severe drug abuse problem in our society, and anyone who has struggled with an addiction (or watched a loved one do so) knows the agony that addiction brings to sufferers and their families. For the most part, addiction is understood to be a result of biological factors and similar to a disease process: the interaction of a powerful chemical with the human nervous system can create a situation in which the body becomes dependent upon the chemical, and withdrawal from that chemical leads to great suffering.

A number of addiction experts dispute the disease model, however, and they offer some convincing counter-arguments. To take a single obvious example, some people seem to develop addictive relationships to activities that don’t involve ingesting chemicals, activities such as gambling or playing games on the Internet. In fact, we seem to be a nation of people who fall rather easily into being controlled by our desires; even those who have no addictions often struggle to control their spending or their food intake.

From my own work on addiction and my reading of the literature, I have no doubt that biological factors are an important part of addiction, but I also agree with those who point out that the disease model simply cannot explain the broad range of problems we group under headings like addiction or dependency. Until someone comes up with the data to show that all addictions are the result of a single underlying biological mechanism—something akin to the measles virus, say—we are better off trying to understand addiction in the as the result of complex interactions between biological, social, and psychological factors.

So, in that spirit: What if we try re-conceptualizing some sorts of addiction as one part of a larger issue, the issue of feeling controlled by desires so strong that we cannot resist them? Then the question becomes, “why are we so likely to become convinced that we are helpless to control our desires?” The answer is that our society has an extraordinarily effective means of creating and strengthening certain social values. We call this system entertainment.

In Caught in Play I pay special attention to the importance of the emotionally powerful experiences we can have when we become “caught up” in entertainment activities. I suspect everyone is familiar with such experiences—who hasn’t had the feeling of being so absorbed in a book that it’s hard to put down, or so immersed in a game that one loses track of everything else? In such experiences we have the sense that we are to some extent being controlled by something beyond ourselves, and we are bound to wonder what that something is. The answer that comes most easily to mind is that we are controlled by the ideas or practices or substances that are prominent in whatever fantasy it is that we are caught up in.

For instance, we become caught up in a tale of romance and we conclude—more on the basis of our feelings than our thoughts—that romance is a powerful force, impossible to resist. We become caught up in an advertisement for a car and we conclude that certain cars (or material products generally) can transform our experience. We become caught up in an acting performance by an attractive celebrity and we conclude that the celebrity is irresistible. When much of the population has such experiences repeatedly throughout the day, many begin to feel that they are powerless to resist potent emotional experiences.

In such an environment, many people are likely to understand their experiences with drugs along the same lines: the drug (like the potent experiences of entertainment) has the power to overwhelm the will. That’s not the whole explanation of our addiction problem, but it’s not irrelevant either.

This blog is about “entertainment,” and in writing it I feel like a salmon trying to talk to other salmon about water. Not only is entertainment all around us, but various factors conspire to make it difficult to assess, even difficult to notice. For example, what we mean by entertainment is diversion, that which takes us away from serious pursuits. But one of the things I want to say is that entertainment has some very serious consequences for our culture and our way of life. In doing so, I may seem like someone who needs to loosen up. “It’s just fun! Don’t take it so seriously, dude!”

If you are an academic calling attention to entertainment, many people automatically assume you are a bore. There have always been plenty of people who do try and take entertainment seriously, pointing out, for example, that television watching is a less worthy pursuit than, say, reading poetry. Or perhaps that violence on television is bad for children. These commentators on entertainment often have valid and important points to make, but sometimes they are also sort of annoying, preachy even.

No preaching here, I don’t mean to tell you not to partake of entertainment. Instead, I just want to urge you to think about your engagement with entertainment. Like, let’s talk honestly about Brad and Angelina. You don’t give a shit about Brad and Angelina, do you? You’re not some tabloid junkie, you’re reading this for God’s sake, you’re a different demographic. Why then, if it so happened that you saw Brad or Angelina in an airport, would you tell everyone you could about it? What’s up with this?

You can at least begin to see how this sort of matter has some relevance for addictive behavior, because at heart this is question is similar to: “Why do some people keep drinking when they recognize that it would be better for them to quit? Why do some women keep dating the same sort of guy when they recognize that it would be better to change the pattern? Why are some people—you, for example—intrigued by celebrities when you recognize that really it’s sort of silly? Why is your behavior not entirely under your control here?

(This is a lightly edited version of a post that first appeared in Psychology Today, further comments available there)