Games can be so much fun that people devote much of their waking time to them. As they do so, their skill grows, which can make the game even more compelling. At some point, for some people, the game becomes so important that it begins to impinge upon the player’s other valued activities, such as other interests or social relationships, and the player’s life begins to deteriorate. How can this happen?

In a recent book on one of the oldest and purest competitive games—chess—anthropologist Robert Desjarlais takes up this question (among many others). He suggests the possibility that those who play a game seriously may do so because it is a haven of meaningfulness in a world that often seems meaningless.

Desjarlais writes (Counterplay, p. 114): “To begin a chess game is to step into the unknown, to foresee vague possibilities, to encounter formations at once familiar and unexpected.”A game is like a highly simplified version of everyday life. One’s decisions have consequences for the future. We know that each move we make, in life or in a game, determines a unique path for the future. In both chess and life, our possible paths are in practice infinite. However, in chess it will become obvious relatively quickly whether you made the right choices, because there will be an ending, in which you will win, lose or draw. In this, chess is like a story: there is an ending that makes it clear what it all meant.

In life, there is an ending, but we don’t get to know what it is, because we are dead. The point is that games are like living life—we make decisions that influence the outcome—but in games the situation is set up so that we can know how it all adds up. This adding up, this meaningfulness, is one of the most important things that draws people to games.

But it is not at all unusual for players of chess, like players of many other games (role-playing games, video games, games of chance, etc.) to begin to feel that the world of the game is more meaningful than the world of everyday life. It could be the personality of the player, or it could be the nature of the player’s everyday world, or it could be that the player is really good at the game and falls for the rewards of playing.

Whatever the reason, when the meaning of the game outweighs the meaning of the world, something than enhances life has slipped into something that detracts from it. It’s an open question whether this situation should be called addiction. After all, classic drug addictions aren’t typically based in the search for meaning. But it is useful, in our attempt to understand why a person can get pulled into something that begins to take over their life, that the problem can even be based in something that virtually defines our humanity: our quest for meaning.

Photo by Sourabh Massey.

I’m sure most of you were just as surprised as I was when the world didn’t end on May 21, as Harold Camping had prophesied. That is to say, you weren’t surprised at all. I had actually made a prophecy of my own the previous week, although it didn’t get much media attention. “Lo,” I said to my wife, “the world shall not end on May 21. And when it doth not end, Harold Camping shall smite himself upon his own forehead and proclaim, “oops, I got the date wrong.” I was right! Admittedly, this was not a difficult prophecy to make, sort of like prophesying that the sun will come up tomorrow morning.

My next prophecy is a little more surprising, and therefore you would think I would gain some prophet credibility when it comes true. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen because anyone who checks into the matter will find out that this prediction is based on years of sociological and psychological research. Here it is: Harold Camping’s followers, the ones who believed him, who did things like spending all their money by May 21, will not do what one would expect them to do in the coming weeks. One would expect them to say something like, “Harold Camping obviously was not the prophet I assumed him to be, and just as obviously he’s just covering his ass with this ‘new date’ crap.” Instead, if they act like other believers who have found themselves in this position when other “world is ending” prophecies have been proved wrong, many of these followers will continue to believe that God speaks through Harold Camping. In fact, not only will they continue to believe, they will re-double their efforts to convince others to believe as well.

This was the conclusion of Leon Festinger’s classic study of a prophetic movement, When Prophecy Fails. Festinger and his colleagues showed that a religious movement which formed around a woman who predicted the arrival of aliens on a particular date actually gained members after the day passed without incident. Festinger’s explanation of this paradox was based on the notion of “cognitive dissonance,” which has become a richly documented concept for understanding how people react to evidence that conflicts with their cherished beliefs. The flying saucer believers faced strong cognitive dissonance when their beliefs came into conflict with what actually happened in the world. They found that they could reduce this dissonance if their numbers were actually growing—that counted as evidence that the prophet was correct in her revised date (there is almost always a revised date). This made it possible for believers to hold onto the beliefs in which they had invested so much.

There is a moral to this story, something that I remind myself of often, something that I find very useful in my attempts to understand our interesting species. The moral is: Although capable of reason, humans should not be assumed to be fundamentally rational. More often than we are likely to admit, we use our powers of reason to justify ideas and actions dictated by our emotions.

Photo by Ian W. Scott

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 Matti Mattila

This time of year one is certain to encounter the opinion that we have lost the true spirit of Christmas in the orgy of consumption that has come to characterize our greatest holiday. While I am sympathetic to those who wish to encourage virtues such as charity and gratitude, I’d also like to point out that in fact consumption is as much a part of the true spirit of Christmas as anything else.

Christmas is a ritual, and like all rituals it reflects the social and even political circumstances of the people that practice it. For hundreds of years after Christianity began, the holiday of Christmas did not exist, so in this sense if we want to get back to the original spirit of Christmas we should not celebrate it at all (which, by the way, is what the Puritans did).

Christmas was first established as a church holiday in the fourth century. Conveniently enough it was scheduled on the calendar right at the time of the pagan Roman ceremonies that Christianity was beginning to displace. And even today several of our Christmas traditions are based on the winter solstice rituals practiced by European peoples before their conversion to Christianity. So in this sense, if we want to find the true spirit of Christmas we have to look to pagan ceremonies.

However, what I particularly want to look at here are the changes that occurred in America and Great Britain during the 19th century. At this time, Christmas became a much more important and universal holiday than it had been before, and this was not because churches wanted to put more emphasis on the birth of Jesus Christ. Historians stress that it was a combination of commercial forces and ideas about sentimentality and domesticity—encapsulated in the growing fascination with the new image of Santa Claus—that managed to turn Christmas into a major occasion for gift-giving.

In short, without consumerism we would not have Christmas as we know it. This illustrates a point I have tried to make a number of times before: We live in a culture with two somewhat contradictory sets of values. The first set is the official one, and includes such ideas as responsibility, hard work, religious faith, integrity, etc. The second set is what I have called “shadow values,” and includes such ideas as the pursuit of pleasure, self-indulgence, leisure, and sexual desire. In general, the first set of values is associated with work and production, the second set with leisure time and consumption.

We need these two sets of values because our society and economy require us to be highly productive workers and frenetic consumers at the same time. If we did not play both these roles, how could continual economic expansion be ensured? Christmas is simultaneously about both sets of values. Christians give homage to the deity who stands behind our highest values at the same time as almost everyone gives enthusiastic homage the values that remain in the shadows. That’s the true spirit of Christmas.

Photo by V Smoothe

Recently George Will published a column bemoaning the economic irrationality of holiday gift-giving. I’m as happy as the next guy to read something scroogy at this time of the year, but his column misses the boat pretty badly. Therefore, I offer the following contribution to Mr. Will’s understanding; think of it as my holiday gift to him.

Mr. Will was actually reviewing a new book on Christmas gifts, a book with the subtitle “Why you shouldn’t buy presents for the holidays,” An enormous store of economic value is destroyed by such gifts, says Mr. Will, because very often the giver pays much more for the gift than the recipient would. That is, the recipient doesn’t really get anything of appreciable value, because the gift isn’t anything he or she especially wants. Since many gifts are poorly matched to recipients preferences, and millions of gifts are given, billions of dollars of economic value evaporate nation-wide. The columnist compares this to the economic destruction wrought by a hurricane.

I don’t know if this analysis holds up from an economic perspective. However, it doesn’t work very well from a common sense perspective. It is an error–a pretty obvious one, actually—to consider gift giving a form of economic exchange. Gift giving, as anthropologists and sociologists established long ago, is a form of ritual.

In a typical economic transaction in our society—such as a purchase–the ideal is to exchange one thing of value (usually money) for something else of equivalent value to the purchaser. If gifts were economic exchanges of this sort, then we would pay the giver for them, or perhaps just hand them right back to the giver (a perfect exchange!). Obviously, if anything like that happened, the event wouldn’t qualify as “receiving a gift.”

At the same time, however, it is also obvious that gifts aren’t the same thing as “free stuff.” If you want a clue about what a gift really is, think about whether you would want to accept a nice gift from somebody you think is rather creepy. Most of us, I think, will recognize that even if Mr. Creepy is offering us something we’d like to have, we are not going to want to take it. The reason is that a gift creates a social relationship. Accepting a gift is a way of saying, “I am willing to be in your debt and do something for you in the future.” Unless you were raised by wolves, you will feel some sort of obligation to someone who gives you a gift. And you probably don’t want to have obligations to creepy people.

The fact that gifts create obligations has been used by human beings in many times and places to create various sorts of social relationships, but that’s a topic for another time. For the moment, I’ll stick to the main point: An economic analysis of holiday gift giving is like a chemical analysis of sex, it sort of misses the heart of the matter for human beings. People aren’t trying to maximize economic value with holiday gifts, they are trying—sometimes, admittedly, in awkward ways–to express their feelings for one another.

Photo by tuchodi

Benjamin Franklin asserted that the turkey , not the eagle, should be our national symbol, calling the former a “much more respectable bird.” I’ll give you another reason to favor the turkey for this job: We eat it in our national feast. In order to explain this, I must relate some facts from long ago.

Among the greatest Biblical scholars of the 19th century was the Scot William Robertson Smith. Smith was excommunicated by his church, however, because his findings did not sit well with the religious authorities of the time. Perhaps the most influential of his ideas was that a common ritual stood at the heart of ancient religions. In this ritual an animal that symbolizes the group of worshipers is sacrificed and then eaten by the group. This communal feast, held Robertson-Smith, was the basis for the kinship that held the group together: it was by eating together that a common bond of kinship was created. Robertson-Smith based his argument on documents describing the early religious practices of Semitic peoples, but he also held that similar communal feasts could be observed world-wide.

One of Smith’s readers was Sigmund Freud, who used Smith’s theory as a basis for his book Totem and Taboo. Freud combined his own ideas about the Oedipus Complex with Smith’s about the communal feast, and came up with the following: The communal feast is a somewhat watered-down version of a ritual that was practiced at the very origin of our species. In the original form, the sacrificial victim was not an animal representing the group, rather it was the dominant male in the group; his male offspring eventually became strong enough to kill their father, thereby ending his monopolistic control over the females of the group. Then, for good measure, the group of sons ate the old guy, gristly though he must have been. Later, feeling guilty about the whole business, they came to worship his memory.

Is any of this true? Probably not: Smith combined some interesting evidence with a good deal of conjecture and speculation, and then Freud added another layer of speculation. But I also think it would be wrong to dismiss these theories as simple nonsense. After all, billions of people do in fact believe some version of the idea that it is important to share a meal comprised of the (either symbolic or real) body of God; Christians call this communion. And it really is also true that many other religions contain some version of this idea—a ritual based on eating a sacrificial victim that represents both the worshippers and God. But of course, at the end of the day, these are simply interesting observations, and no one really knows how (or if) they fit together.

So we are left with a mystery: When Americans feast on an animal that can be said to represent them, they express elements of a strange human behavioral pattern that surely stretches back before the beginning of recorded history. Why does this basic ceremony appear so often across different cultural traditions? The answers that Freud and Robertson Smith offered were probably wrong, but that doesn’t mean the mystery isn’t real.

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 credit: Mr. 119th Street

You remember Rumpelstiltskin, right? Ugly little dude with some serious spinning wheel skills. He rescues a fair maiden from doom by spinning straw into gold. But in return he extracts a terrible price: when she has a child, she must hand it over to him. She eventually is able to escape this obligation because she guesses his name. Rumpelstiltskin doesn’t take this well, and tears himself in half.

What does this have to do with Halloween?

When I was a youngster, I could never understand why this powerful, albeit ugly, guy couldn’t just take the kid. Why is he rendered powerless when fair maiden (actually, I guess she’s no longer a maiden at that point) guesses his name? As I got a little older, I learned that it is not uncommon, in the world’s myths and religions, for supernatural figures to have secret names. For example, you may know that the ancient Israelis followed various practices intended to conceal the true name of God.

So, that’s a hint: The power of a supernatural being is sometimes thought to depend on concealing its name. The reason for this was explained many years ago by anthropologists such as Victor Turner and Mary Douglas. Douglas proposed a cognitive theory to explain the power of the un-named: Every society has, built into its language and thought, systems of classification that divide the world into various categories. But there are always things that don’t fit very well into any classification system. And, throughout history and across the globe, things that don’t fit into classification systems are thought to be mysterious and powerful.

Consider, for example, the popular classification of living beings in English. Two of our important categories are animals and birds. For the most part, it’s pretty obvious what goes where. But what about bats? Animals should have something under their feet; celebrity flying squirrels aside, no self-respecting creature with fur flies. And no self-respecting bird has fur. Before the advent of scientific classification, the bat was a complete anomaly. Therefore, we don’t know just what it is. The bat is like a being without a name: eerie, mysterious, dangerous.

We also classify time into categories: day and night, this year and next year, and so on. Therefore, according to the theory, we should expect to find that the moments of time that stand between these categories are oddly powerful. And indeed, magical transformations are likely to occur at midnight, religious groups hold their ceremonies at the end or the beginning of the week, and New Year’s Eve is becomes the occasion for a wild party.

In parts of pre-Christian Europe, of course, Halloween was New Years Eve, a moment when the very boundary between life and death was thought to dissolve. As Turner pointed out, these moments of transition are not only unknown, they contain within themselves the awesome power of transformation, for through them, one thing becomes another thing.

And so we are reluctant to give up our celebrations of transformation. These days, on Halloween we don masks and disguises so that we too will be unknown; we attempt to appropriate the powers of the transitional to ourselves. Enjoy Halloween, and keep in mind that you are celebrating ideas that were probably first formulated in the Paleolithic era.

Photo by Michael Tracey

Again and again, throughout human history, the following events have played out: Step One: A group of people faces a threat of some kind. Perhaps a powerful army is advancing toward its borders, or perhaps a severe economic crisis portends uncertainty and privation. Or perhaps it is just that the group is being left behind as others successfully pursue wealth and status.

Step Two: Despair begins to spread. Some respond with apathy, others with violence. Suicide rates may increase, along with rates of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety disorders. Hopelessness and apathy are rampant; many turn to heavy use of alcohol or other available drugs.

Step Three: A powerful leader arises, typically a person who has him or herself suffered as a result of the society’s troubles. Usually—although not always—the leader’s power stems from a claim to speak for God. The leader’s message is: Follow me, I know the way out of our dilemma. The leader specifies what people must do—engage in a holy war, perform certain rituals, give up alcohol, etc.—and promises that a realm of paradise awaits his or her disciples. But those who hear the message and reject it will be punished not only by exclusion from the coming paradise, but by death and damnation.

Possibly these steps sound familiar to you. They outline the basic structure of what scholars of religion call millenarian movements (so named for a Biblical prophecy that Christ will reign over the Kingdom of God for a thousand years). You may be able to name several of the religions that have started in this way and have changed the course of human history: Christianity, Islam, Mormonism. And of course, smaller movements of this sort continue to arise today, and sometimes become the focus of media attention, especially when their clashes with the larger society lead to violence (Jim Jones in Guyana, the Branch Davidians in Waco).

Starting around the turn of the 20th century, there was a frightening development in the long history of millenarianism: It began to take secular (non-religious) forms. Powerful leaders emerged in the chaos of Europe during and after the first world war who promised utopias based on the principles of their political systems—communism and the Thousand Year Reich. As we all know, the chain of events set in motion by these social movements led to unprecedented horrors.

Although there have been many millenarian movements in America, no such movement has ever taken the reigns of the government. However, it’s interesting to think about whether we have created—and are living in—our own distinctive, and relatively benign, form of millenarianism. At roughly the same time as the rise of millenarian-tinged totalitarianism in Europe, Americans began to develop extraordinarily effective techniques of advertising and entertainment. The new innovation that built these institutions was nothing other than the basic premise of millenarianism, promises of a world of enormous pleasure and satisfaction if you will just buy this product—whether it be a car or a movie or a soft drink.

Today our society is plagued by high rates of boredom and apathy, of depression and anxiety, and an intractable drug addiction problem. No wonder that people are happy to retreat into the utopian fantasies of the romance novel, the blockbuster movie, the dream of a new iPhone. It’s millenarianism lite: no eternal damnation, no death camps, all utopia all the time. Could be worse, I suppose.