Hello, friends! Welcome back to the show, my guest today.
It's Dr. Laith Alshawaf.
He's an evolutionary psychologist, researcher and associate professor in the Department of Psychology at UCCS.
Humans have a wide range of emotions, but why do we feel anything at all?
Why do we have a felt sense of emotions and how did they evolve?
Expect to learn the evolutionary story of why humans feel stuff, whether some emotions are more basic than others, evolutionary explanations for joy, anger, disgust, envy or happiness?
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But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Dr.
Laith Alshawaf. Why do we have emotions?
Well, emotions are adaptive and they serve a function even though they're often maligned and regarded as irrational.
And there's a long history in psychology and philosophy of regarding emotions as these irrational forces that get us into trouble.
They really each have evolved for a reason and serve a function.
And so for example fear protects us from danger, disgust protects us from pathogens and from contamination, anger helps us to negotiate with people who are not treating us well enough or who are blocking our goals.
Romantic love serves to bond people together in a pair bond to bind each other to bind two people to each other.
Envy is a useful status in navigate is a useful emotion in navigating status hierarchies and and so on and so forth.
And so each emotion has an evolved function something tied to survival or reproduction or some other kind of goal that is tributary to survival and reproduction like navigating status hierarchies and repairing relationships and building friendships and alliances and so on and so forth.
And so they all serve a function.
Why have they been so maligned?
Why have they not been super popular in the world of psychology?
If they're this useful, if they give us all of these advantages and they help us stay alive and navigate things, why are people saying that they're irrational or that they're in conflict with cognition?
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question.
I think part of the reason and this is something that we might talk about over the course of the podcast is that there's something that I think of as the emotion paradox, which is that on the one hand, yes, emotions are adaptive and useful and functional, and they help you survive and reproduce and raise
your children and avoid illness and infection.
But on the other hand, they also do cause people great distress.
They can lead us astray.
They are involved in a lot of psychological disorders and a lot of people in one way or another do suffer because of their emotions.
And so there are these two truths that we need to reconcile the fact that they are adaptive and useful and functional on the one hand, and we really couldn't do the basic tasks of survival and reproduction without them.
But on the other hand, they do cause distress.
They do sometimes lead us to behave in ways that don't serve our interests.
They do sometimes seem short -sighted.
And so we have both of these together and we need to figure out a way to reconcile them.
We can either do that now or we can build up to that as you wish.
But I did want to add one other thing.
One other reason why I think emotions are given short shrift.
It's that we tend to think of emotions as just the way that state feels.
Fear is usually thought of as feeling afraid, what it feels like to be afraid.
Disgust, when you say the word disgust, people think about what it feels like to feel disgusted.
But emotions are more than just the feeling state, more than just the subjective phenomenology.
They're a whole host of changes in our body and brain and mind and behavior.
So for example, when you feel afraid, it is the feeling state, but it's also that your attention narrows to the dangerous stimulus and your perception is heightened.
Your physiology, things like digestion and reproduction are suppressed because they're not needed right now.
And your hunger falls away and you focus instead on escape and energy is shunted toward the muscles for escape.
And your memory is activated such that if you know the terrain, escape routes become more salient for you.
And no way you're better at navigating when you're afraid.
Yeah. And we see similar things for other emotions too.
They're essentially not just affecting how you feel, they're affecting your psychology and your physiology and your behavior all at once in an orchestrated, coordinated fashion in order to help you solve the problem at hand.
So when you disgust people, for example, they don't just feel disgusted, they also actually mount an immune response involving the release of pro -inflammatory cytokines.
And they have an increase in basal body temperature, which is part of the immune response.
And they report feeling less extroverted and feeling less open to experience, which makes total sense because if there is a pathogen threat, this is not a good time to be hugging and affiliating and touching people and trying new things and trying new foods.
They also behaviorally avoid the source of contamination.
You can actually see that in the lab and sexual arousal becomes more difficult to achieve if you've disgusted someone.
Subjects become less willing to engage in risks, especially pathogenic risks.
So you're not seeing either just a feeling change or an arbitrary set of irrational changes.
You're seeing a set of adaptive changes that functionally cohere and fit together and serve a function, which in the case of disgust is avoiding infection.
And so I think we have this tendency in the general public and in psychology to overly identify the emotion with the feeling state, when in reality the feeling state is one of more than a dozen things that's going on in the body and mind.
And so one way of thinking about it, this is kind of the way that I and some of my colleagues talk about it, is emotions as coordinating mechanisms, which really means an emotion coordinates or regulates many different systems in your body and mind, attention, physiology, perception, behavior, memory,
et cetera, in service of solving an adaptive problem, the problem that that emotion is geared toward solving.
Why do we pay so much attention to how it feels then?
Is that simply that it's the the most salient, it's sort of front and center, and how could we experience our increased basal temperature and the cytokine response?
It's the only part of our emotions that we have access to.
I think that's a huge part of it.
I think it's basically a cognitive bias on our part whereby one, as you say, it's simply the thing that is most salient and that we have the most conscious access to.
And secondly, it's obvious, it's also the case that the feeling state is the most valenced, it's the most by nature, positive or negative emotions tend to feel good or feel bad.
And since we obviously care about how things feel, we tend to hyper focus on that.
So I think it's kind of a product of it being the most consciously accessible and salient on the one hand with us caring about how it feels and it being the most valenced on the other hand.
I've heard you say emotions are there to help us advocate for our own needs and interests.
Is that an overarching summary in some form of most emotions or emotions?
I think so, but I'd probably need to add some caveats and tweaks.
First of all, some emotions seem more social than others.
So for example, guilt seems to be about repairing relationships where we've harmed somebody that we are supposed to be valuing, but we fail to value enough.
Anger seems to be about demanding better treatment from those who aren't valuing us enough or not placing enough emphasis on our welfare.
These are very social emotions.
Disgust on the other hand, especially pathogen disgust is geared toward avoiding infection and avoiding contamination.
So you could still think of it as serving your interests.
Your interests are avoiding infection and fear is still serving your interests in terms of avoiding falling off a cliff or avoiding being harmed by an assailant.
But some of these emotions are a bit more interpersonal than others and there the notion of serving our interests acquires a more specific meaning.
It often involves negotiating with others.
But I do want to add one other caveat because someone recently told me that maybe they had misinterpreted this or it had been unclear.
I guess when they heard advocating for our interests, it seemed to them like I was suggesting emotions are selfish or that they're all about looking out only for me.
They're not only about looking out for me.
They're about pair bonding and raising my children and protecting them and helping friends and allies and so on and so forth.
But those are also our interests, helping our children, helping our friends, having loving relationships and so on.
So when I say advocate for our interests, I don't mean in a purely selfish way.
I mean in the broader way of building networks of affiliative kin and friends and all of that good stuff.
Yeah, it's like our interests in the ultimate fitness version of the sense, which includes kin, which includes the local tribe, which includes etc or excludes other tribes, so on and so forth.
I wonder if there's almost a way that you could see the advocacy, which is kind of like the functional word in that quote of yours, discussed almost advocating for why you should behave the way that you do during disgust, fear advocating to you about why you should.
It's almost like you're negotiating with yourself and those of us that have got stronger inner monologues almost do that quite a lot.
So yeah, I almost get this sense that it's like a personal advocacy for me.
This is why I should behave in this manner.
But then there's other times, especially with something like love, where tell me why you love them.
Oh, I don't know. And then list totally, it's the way that she walks and it's the smell of her hair and it's the curve of her lower back and it's the way that she drinks her cut.
Do you know what I mean?
It's like totally arbitrary things.
So I guess we have more transparency with some than others.
Yeah, that's probably true.
Some emotions, functions are probably clearer than others and some maybe are supposed to be harder to discern or they're more useful when they're harder to discern.
So there's a famous view on love, which is that love helps you to solve the commitment problem.
It helps you to bond with another person when it in the absence of love, it might be in your interest to always remain open to other options and to cheat on your partner and so on.
But what love does is it, the way that this author puts it is it brings the costs of cheating from the future into the present.
So one of the classic problems is that if you were to cheat on your partner, you would obtain the benefits now and you would pay the costs later.
But we tend to be future discounters who pay a lot of attention to present and discount future.
And if you had a purely rationalist calculator who didn't have emotions, who also had the tendency to delay the future discount and to focus on the now, it would often be the case that the rational calculus would tell you to go ahead and cheat rather than holding back and cementing the pair bond.
But if you experience love, then right now you feel guilt at the notion of cheating.
Right now, you feel compelled not to because you're pair bonded and emotionally glued to your partner.
So the way he puts it and I kind of like this phrase is it sort of brings or pulls the costs from the future into the present so that you feel the costs right now and it alters your calculus and you're more likely to stick with your partner.
The other point that this author makes his name is Robert Frank is he points out that you don't really want to be with someone who can give you a very rational explanation for why they love you.
Because if they list all of these reasons, well, they might just meet somebody who does better in the future.
I've got all of those plus they can play the guitar.
Exactly. And so, you know, kind of counter intuitively, but it makes sense when you reflect on it.
He suggests you want somebody who doesn't love you for rational reasons, who's emotionally glued to you without a rational list of criteria.
And so that's kind of interesting because that's very much related to what you were saying a moment ago.
The idea of our own insight around certain emotions being obfuscated or opaque or muddy in one form or another, being adaptive, even that like this, our own sense of metacognition about emotions individually being different is also adaptive to be able to keep these emotions doing their thing.
It's wild. It's so interesting.
Yeah, I think another reason emotions have been have been regarded as maladaptive or have been given short shrift is that some of the emotions feel bad and we just don't like feeling bad.
And there's this emphasis in some areas of psychology and in the general public on feeling good.
I mean, we really have a cult of positivity in a lot of Western cultures.
And so, you know, fear is supposed to fear feels bad, disgust feels bad, but they all serve a function, you know, feel fear feels bad, but it protects you from various dangers, disgust feels aversive, it protects you from pathogens, shame feels bad, but it helps you to avoid status loss and reputational
loss and engaging in the behaviors that would cause that status loss.
Jealousy feels bad, but it protects valued maidships from abandonment or maid poaching.
And so it's kind of like pain, you know, pain feels bad, but pain is not a problem itself.
It's a signal to you that there's an external problem that's happening like tissue damage, and that it's important for the organism to avoid that problem.
So the the fact that the emotion feels bad, we tend to hyper focus on that.
But the negative or aversive emotions are just as functional and adaptive and useful as the positive emotions.
It's just that they evolve to help us survive and reproduce not to make us feel good.
Yeah, and we don't like them.
So why would you spend that much time thinking about them?
So what, what additional perspective does taking an evolutionary lens to emotions give us?
What is it that's special about the evolutionary frame that allows us to see emotions more clearly?
Well, one thing it does is it highlights the utility and adaptiveness of even the quote unquote negative emotions showing that they're just as functional as the positive ones.
Another thing that it does is what we were talking about a moment ago, which is highlights that the emotion is not just the feeling states.
It is a whole host of changes in attention and memory and conceptual categorization and physiology and behavior and so on.
And all of these changes are geared toward again, solving the adaptive problem at hand.
So it not only broadens out our conceptualization of emotions, so that we stop thinking of it as just the feeling state, the phenomenal, phenomenological state.
But it shows us how the other components like the changes in cognition and physiology and behavior form a functionally coherent set that are solving a certain problem.
They're not arbitrary or willy -nilly.
I would say it also offers kind of a different perspective on, we know that some emotions are universal, and there's debate about other emotions.
And there's a perspective on the emotions that suggests, a kind of cultural perspective that suggests that different cultures have different emotions.
And if you look at some languages, like the Japanese have amai and the Germans have schadenfreude, those words, those emotion, emotion words don't exist in English.
And so some people will say, well, that means that we lack those emotions or we can't feel those emotions.
An evolutionary perspective suggests a different way of looking at it, which is that those superficial linguistic differences are underlain by cross -cultural uniformity in the psychology.
We still have those emotions, we just don't have a single word for that.
And so to paraphrase another author, he suggested that when you share with an English speaker the German word schadenfreude, they don't say like, oh, what is this concept I've never, I couldn't possibly imagine it.
They say, oh, you mean there's a word for it?
Cool. And so an evolutionary perspective offers us a different way of thinking about these linguistic differences.
They're more like surf on a wave, superficial linguistic differences, probably underlain by deeper cross -cultural uniformity in the psychology.
And then I think another thing that an evolutionary perspective does is it helps us understand how to resolve the emotion paradox.
So remember, we were saying earlier that emotions are useful and functional and adaptive, but they cause great distress and they can lead us astray.
And it helps us resolve this paradox or reconcile these two facts.
One insight is that emotions evolve to promote adaptive action, not to help us feel good.
That's an important distinction because we start to see why aversive emotions could be totally functional.
Another insight is that again, emotions evolve for adaptive action, but not to be maximally accurate or maximally veridical.
They might be, what does veridical mean, please?
accurate or cottoning onto the truth.
So like a great example is anxiety.
Our anxiety is hyperactive, overreactive.
And this is explained by what psychiatrist Randy Nessie calls the smoke detector principle or what some others have called error management theory.
And it's basically the idea that when you build a smoke alarm, there's two kinds of errors it can make can either fail to detect a real fire, which would be catastrophic and deadly, or it can detect a fire when there isn't one and it can sound the alarm when we're just cooking.
And that's just a minor nuisance.
So we actually build smoke alarms on purpose, not to be maximally accurate, we build them to be biased toward false alarms so as to avoid the catastrophic error.
And the idea is that this underlying logic doesn't just apply to human engineered systems like smoke alarms, it applies to animal brains.
And it applies to the human brain when it comes to anxiety.
Anxiety is like a century or vigilance system that detects threats in the environment.
And so it can make one of two kinds of errors.
It can fail to detect a real threat, which could be very deadly, or it could detect a threat when there isn't one there and mount the anxiety response in a defensive fashion that isn't actually needed.
And so the insight is that our brains have evolved to be adaptively biased in the direction of the safer error.
That's why our anxiety has so many false alarms.
That's why it's so overreactive.
But the cool insight is that it's not a bug, it's a feature.
This is not our brains going haywire, there's nothing pathological about us.
The system is actually built not to be maximally accurate, but to be maximally safe.
And that design produces errors.
And so this distinction between emotions evolved not to be maximally accurate, but rather to serve our survival and reproductive interests helps us to understand something like why anxiety is so hyperactive.
And I think maybe that could even take some of this sting out of anxiety, because it helps people realize there's nothing wrong with you.
Your brain is working normally.
Everybody's like this.
And the reason our brains evolved this way, there's an underlying adaptive logic to it.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
You're not a weirdo.
We're all like this, and there's good reason for it.
So that's another thing I think an evolutionary perspective can do.
And then of course, there are other useful distinctions that it offers in reconciling the two facets of the emotion paradox.
And another one is evolutionary mismatch.
We evolved in a very different environment than the one we inhabit today.
And so there may be emotions that were ancestrally adaptive may or may not be currently adaptive in some of the situations that we face.
And we may face conditions now that heighten our anxiety or depression relative to ancestral conditions.
Many of us live, for example, without close kin and friends around us in these modern anonymous cities, we get less exercise and live sedentary lifestyles and eat crappy food and processed food and so on.
And so there's a number of these insights, like evolved for survival and reproduction, not for happiness, not for accuracy, evolutionary mismatch, meaning ancestrally adaptive, not necessarily currently adaptive, that help us to understand how emotions can be both good and bad at once.
Are there some emotions that are more basic than others?
I seem to remember, at some point reading something about facial expressions and there's five basic emotions, and maybe there's a six and we don't know or whatever.
But when I think about emotions like the sympathy empathy line or the guilt shame line, you know, there's like a million permutations and there's even words in other languages for ones that we have to say an entire paragraph to be able to explain.
So when it comes to thinking about the constituent colors, the primary colors of emotions and how that works, how do you come to think about that?
There is a common view that there are some emotions that are more basic or more fundamental than others.
I don't buy this view, but I'll just say that the people who do buy this view typically view joy, distress, or sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, and fear as more basic, quote unquote, than other emotions.
But there isn't a strong theoretical reason to call these basic and others non -basic.
And it's honestly, it's a bit of a historical accident that goes back to some seminal findings in the sixties and seventies where, as you said, researchers discovered that some of these emotions had universal facial expressions.
And also these facial expressions were universally recognizable.
So you could take a picture of somebody expressing emotion from one culture to another culture, and they knew exactly what they were looking at.
And those were really cool and really groundbreaking findings.
But then the authors kind of went beyond that and said that in order to count as basic or fundamental, an emotion must have a universal facial expression, and that facial expression must be universally recognizable.
But there's no real reason to stipulate that.
It's kind of an arbitrary stipulation.
If you think about it, whether or not an emotion comes along with a facial expression depends on the costs and benefits of signaling that emotion to others.
There might be some emotions that are positively harmful to signal to others like envy, which is a covert emotion that you use to climb up the status.
You wouldn't want to signal that to others.
Or maybe regrets might be an internal recalibrational emotion that helps us make better decisions in the future when we've messed up in the past.
You wouldn't need to wear that on your face.
Jealousy may be one that jealousy, as distinguished from envy, is about protecting your valued relationships from abandonment or loss or made poaching or whatever, may be useful to signal it, may not be useful to signal it, depending on context.
And so a kind of a more modern way of thinking about emotions from an evolutionary perspective suggests that some of them may have universal facial expressions, some of them may have no facial expression at all, and some of them may have facial expressions that are only deployed in certain contexts,
depending on the costs and benefits.
There isn't really a need, as those earlier theorists did, to insist that it must have a universal facial expression.
Do you come to think of some as more fundamental than others?
Or is it simply that some are more commonly used?
I don't think of them as any of them as more fundamental than others.
I think of each of them as having evolved for a different purpose.
And so guilt and romantic love and gratitude are usually not included in the basic emotions list.
But why not? They appear to be universal.
They each have a function.
Romantic love bonds us to partners.
Gratitude helps us to increase how much emphasis we place on a valued other when they've given us something good and helped us out.
Guilt helps us to repair a relationship that we've messed up or hurt the other person.
Everybody seems to have these, except certain psychopaths, these emotions and all cultures seem to have them and they seem to serve a function.
And just because they don't have an associated facial expression is not good reason to count them as less fundamental or less basic.
So no, I tend to think of each one as having evolved for a different reason, but not being more or less basic than any of the others.
All right, I want to go through a list of different emotions and get your evolutionary lens on them.
So fear first, it's one of the ones that you've mentioned an awful lot.
Why do we got it? Protect us from dangers such as falling off cliffs, being assaulted by hostile humans, being attacked by predators.
And what does it do to us?
You said makes you better at driving the car home.
You can more accurately map your route.
Well, it mobilizes a bunch of different things in your psychology to solve the problem at hand.
So it heightens your perception and narrows your attention to the predator.
Let's say you need to run away from this predator.
It shuts down the other things like digestion that you don't really need right now and mobilizes resources for running away, shunts energy toward the muscles.
It affects even the way that you conceptually carve up the world.
So I would no longer carve up.
I would no longer think of this mug as aesthetically pleasing or as useful for drinking.
I would start to carve up everything I see as useful or not useful for escaping the dangerous situation.
It must really kill creativity in that form then because you're only looking at things in this much more sort of binary.
How does it relate to this scenario that's going on?
Yeah, I think that's probably true.
It mobilizes all of your resources towards solving this one thing.
So it probably makes you less good at solving other things.
What's going on is it's changing the way you feel, the way you think, the way you remember, the way you conceptually carve up the world, and the way you behave.
It's all of these things at once in service of solving this goal, which is escaping this danger.
And the way that we might think of this is I mentioned one term earlier, which is emotions as coordinating mechanisms, meaning systems that coordinate a lot of changes in the body and mind.
The other term that's sometimes used is emotions as modes of operation.
By which we mean that the whole body and mind go into a different mode of operation.
When you're in fear mode, you're in a different mode than in disgust mode, which is a different mode than guilt or gratitude mode.
And it kind of highlights again that there's a whole cascade of changes in your body and mind, and they functionally cohere towards solving this problem.
So that's fear, for example.
Okay, what about surprise?
That's one that I, it's a emotion I literally forget even exists.
Not that I never feel it, but just, I don't know, it's not front of mind.
Yeah, I don't tend to think much about surprise either, and I haven't done any research on it.
And I tend to think of it as being a slightly less interesting emotion, but it's supposed to focus your attention on the surprising thing, quickly evaluate it as positive or negative and then react accordingly.
To me, it's less of a rich emotion than some of the other ones that we might have.
It's very fleeting, right?
I guess it's, how would I think about it?
I'd probably think about it as some kind of pattern prediction that has been broken.
Like there is a particular expectation I have, and that expectation has gone sideways, and maybe it's a creature that's jumped out in front of me and scurried across in front of the, or maybe it's my partner getting down on one knee to offer me a ring so that we now get married.
You know, the surprise covers a whole range of sins.
Okay, what about awe and dread?
Have you looked at those?
One of my graduate students and I are working on awe right now.
And so, you know, we may have, we've written a paper on it, but haven't submitted it yet.
So, I mean, we think that it's involved.
It's actually, we think it's sort of related to what you were just saying about surprise.
You were mentioning a prediction that you make that is disrupted.
And usually when that happens, you start to pay extra attention to the new incoming stimuli so that you can revise your model of the world so that you can predict more accurately in the future.
And we think awe is related to taking in more information and learning more intently in order to update the way that you approach the world or that stimulus the next time.
What about shame? Shame has been well studied and so is much better understood, especially by a researcher named Daniel Sneezer.
And he's done some really good work showing that shame seems to function to prevent you from engaging behaviors that would cause you status loss and reputation loss in your society and to try also to prevent information about those things if you have engaged in those things from getting out.
So that again, prevents this kind of status loss.
And if you've done a bad thing and it's become known to try to engage in behaviors to mitigate the damage.
And so shame is all about reducing the likelihood of social devaluation.
Because remember in the way we evolved closely knit hunter -gatherer communities, we were and to some extent still are very interdependent.
We need and needed each other to survive.
And you can't do the basic tasks of life alone, whether that's shelter or hunting or repelling invaders or repelling predators or any of that stuff.
And ostracism or being kicked out of the group is one of the worst things that can happen to us for many groups, especially ancestrally that would have been a death sentence.
And so falling in status or being ostracized or being devalued by one's peers is a huge adaptive problem.
And so there's evidence that shame works to prevent us from engaging in those behaviors that cause that loss, prevent information about that loss from getting out.
And then if it has gotten out to appease social others, to placate them, to withdraw, to accept support and to apologize and try to repair those wrongs for the future, all of these changes are cohering toward trying to not let us be socially devalued, try to reduce the likelihood of social devaluation.
I'm going to guess that in the same kind of bucket as these would be something like guilt and maybe regret as well.
Maybe, although there is an important distinction between shame and guilt, which is that guilt is thought of as functioning to repair a relationship with a valued other when you have hurt them or wronged them or transgressed against them or failed to place enough value on their welfare.
So it's about fixing that bond that you've messed up, whereas shame is about preventing yourself from falling in the eyes of your peers.
And I wonder how many people, sorry, I wonder how many people are feeling shame when they say that they're feeling guilt.
I think I, for instance, only until a month ago had interchangeably used jealousy and envy my entire life only for William Costello to tell me that I was stupid and that that wasn't, that they're not the same thing and you can't just interchange them.
But yeah, just thinking about that, thinking about the, he feels guilty.
That's why he's apologizing.
It's like, does he, or based on what you're saying, does he feel shame?
It's this reputational curation that somebody's now doing.
Yeah, and he might feel both, right?
Because given that they're distinct, we can feel both of them.
We might be feeling guilt toward the person we harmed and we're trying to fix that.
And we're feeling shame that other people found out about it.
And we have fallen in status.
So you can feel either one or the other or both, but they are solving different problems.
With shame, one of the cool findings is that what we feel shame about closely tracks what others would devalue us for.
For example, if we list things that I might feel shame about being a bad parent or cheating on a test or hurting these other people or stealing or whatever.
And then we ask other people, how much would you devalue somebody for being a bad parent or cheating on a test or hurting these other people?
We find that there's an extremely strong correlation between the amount of shame I would feel and the amount of social devaluation that others would engage in of me for those things.
So the mechanism works because the degree of shame tracks the degree of third party social devaluation.
And this is even true across cultures because it has been shown in like a 16 culture study that in each culture shame closely tracks the degree of social devaluation that would occur for that bad trait or that bad behavior.
And presumably that changes across cultures.
There's some cultures that would shame you more for this thing and other cultures that would shame you less.
Absolutely. Surprisingly, it changes less between cultures than you might think, because many cultures still agreed on what were the things that would be shameful or that would make you lose in status.
And so even correlations between cultures were on the order of like positive 0 .7, which is actually a very strong correlation.
Within a culture, it was even stronger.
The degree to which shame tracks third party social devaluation.
The flip side of shame seems to be pride, which is about engaging in behaviors and traits that bring you social valuation and respect from your peers, and then advertising those traits and the fact that you have those traits and skills to your peers so that you can benefit from that rise in status.
And studies on pride show that similarly, within a culture, the degree of pride that you feel at those traits or behaviors closely tracks the degree of valuation others would give you for those behaviors.
And even between cultures, there is quite a strong positive correlation between cultures in terms of what people value and thus what people would receive or feel pride for.
What do you make of the very well -established and sort of recently resurging criticism of pride?
You know, it's the Christians aren't keen on it.
A lot of other groups say that it's something that you shouldn't have, that it's a sort of a toxic trait.
And yet, every time I'm yet to meet somebody who gives me a compelling case from a psychological standpoint about why it's a bad idea, I understand.
Like if you get symbolic and start to play lexical Brazilian jiu -jitsu with me and go, what do I mean?
What I really mean by pride is XYZ.
Like, okay, I kind of get it.
But your explanation there, which is something positive, pro -social, which benefits yourself and the group and you would be happy for other people to know about and would give you a positive uplift in the eyes of the people around you.
Like, I wonder basically how much potential self -esteem we have neutered in people by not encouraging them to take pride in things that they've done well.
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, we might be inclined, some people like to distinguish between pride and hubris where they think of pride as earned pride and hubris as unearned pride basically, or pride, you know, pride for things that you actually, for good traits you actually have versus hubris pride for traits
that good traits that you don't have.
So we might draw that distinction, but you know, for any emotion, even for any functional adaptive emotion, it can still undershoot or overshoot.
So you might feel too much pride for a given thing or you might advertise it too much.
And so I can see why even for highly functional adaptive emotions, they can still overshoot or undershoot or they can be triggered in the wrong context or at the wrong time.
And this a little bit about anxiety and how it's adaptive and yet it's expressed when it's not needed.
And that's by design, it's not a bug, it's a feature.
But nonetheless, there are instances where we might bemoan how overactive anxiety is and want to reduce it.
So I can see how even something good like pride or shame could rub some people the wrong way when it's being over expressed or under expressed.
Why do you think that we have seen anxiety, potentially and depression, are the emotions du jour of the modern world, the conversations about it talking all the time, these persistent feelings of hopelessness and listlessness that young girls have between the ages of 12 and 16, etc, etc.
A lot of people talking about rising levels of anxiety, whether it's on their own or social anxiety.
From your perspective, why is it the emotion of the 21st century?
Yeah, a bit speculatively, but I think that we live in a very different way than we used to.
You know, I live, for example, in a country very far from my kin.
And I've moved a lot, as you may have as well.
So you need to build new social support networks, some of the people who matter most to you are very far away.
Many of our jobs may be sedentary, many we may not get a good diet because fast food places and supermarkets are filled with processed food.
And so in some ways, I think, you know, not being supported enough or surrounded enough by kin and close friends, changes in diet and exercise and things like that, as well as being exposed to people, you know, on social media and in regular media, like movies and so on, you're exposed to people who are like
unrealistically attractive and unrealistically successful and unrealistically good at what they do.
And in small group hunter gatherer living, there is a fair shot that you were like the best at something, you were the best weaver or hunter or speaker or healer or whatever.
There just simply wasn't enough people for everybody to try their hand at weaving or hunting or speaking or whatever.
Yeah, and if your whole world was 150 people, you have a fairly good shot at being the best or close to the best at something.
But now you can watch Olympians and famous actors and famous whatevers and you know for a fact, you're not the best tennis player or basketball player or skater or whatever.
And so I think with the broadened exposure to the best of the best and the sort of curated facade that people portray on social media where you compare their facade with your real life and the fact that many of us now have overly sedentary jobs and bad diets and they're not surrounded by kin and friends
as much as we used to be.
I think these things can all lead to an uptick in sadness, depression and anxiety.
But again, even in the best of times, we would still have anxiety and we would still have sadness and we'd still be serving a function.
So sadness, for example, seems to function to do a couple different things.
One is to solicit aid from friends and loved ones and families saying, I'm in need, please support me.
And the other thing is to help you withdraw, conserve resources and recalibrate because you're stuck in something that isn't working, a bad marriage, a bad job, a dead end path.
And so it's helping you to recalibrate and figure out whether your resources and your energy might be better allocated elsewhere and you might need to quit this thing or adjust your strategy.
And so even in the best of times, we'd still have sadness because it's functional and we'd still have anxiety because it's functional.
And as we said earlier, that anxiety would still be manifesting in response to things that it's not strictly needed for because of that overexpression smoke detector principle that we talked about.
And it just seems that we have a modern world which has created a physiological foundation, a kin group atomization foundation, and then it seems like the third big sort of side of it was more kind of like a status anxiety, hierarchy foundation where we can just see all of the successes of everybody
and those things all spun together, create a pretty vicious cocktail for creating persistent anxiety.
I think they could, yeah.
It's a little bit speculative, but to me, all that makes sense.
And then another question that people ask is, why is happiness so difficult to achieve?
Why is it so elusive?
And I think there's good reasons for that too.
And these insights again come from thinking about it evolutionarily.
I mean, for one thing, happiness is we have the hedonic treadmill, for example.
I'm sure you're familiar with this.
This is the notion that we accomplished something and then we feel happy and proud for a short period of time.
But then the pride quickly dissipates, the happiness melts away, and we revert to our emotional baseline.
And it sucks. And we often feel angry or frustrated with ourselves about that.
Like, why can't I just remain happy or proud?
But the answer is that if you think about our ancestors and you imagine some of them achieved something and then they rested on their laurels forever versus others achieved something, and they felt good for a brief period, but they soon began craving their next goal and their next accomplishment.
And you ask, who would have out competed whom?
The answer is very obvious, right?
So the reason our brains are subject to the hedonic treadmill is again, it's not a pathology.
It's not a mistake.
They're like that for a reason.
And so that helps explain one element of why happiness is so elusive, especially like long lasting happiness.
And by the way, I think it takes some of the sting out of the hedonic treadmill.
It helps me to know that this is not a pathology, that my brain is like this for a reason, that the surface apparent irrationality is undergirded by deeper adaptive logic.
But there's other reasons that happiness is elusive too.
There's unavoidable competition between people for status or for jobs or for mates or for food or whatever.
And as long as different people have different goals and don't have perfectly overlapping fitness interests, well, there's going to be some competition between people.
And as long as there's some competition, there's going to be some unhappiness because other people maybe are besting us or we're not able to get our goals because there are obstacles in our way.
As we talked about before, the overexpression of negative emotions like anxiety is another reason why it's difficult to achieve lasting happiness.
And as we also talked about mismatch, evolutionary mismatch is a factor there.
And then there are other things as well.
Recall that we said that emotions to begin with, they don't evolve for our happiness, they evolve for our survival and reproduction.
So we shouldn't be all that surprised when they don't feel good, but they work to help us solve our goals.
And so yeah, I mean, just thinking about why happiness is so elusive, there's lots of reasons from an evolutionary perspective why it would be difficult to achieve long lasting happiness.
It seems like your approach to a lot of the emotions that you have is to almost, especially the negative ones, to realize that you in some bizarre circular sense should be grateful.
It's like thank you to my brain for looking out for me.
I know that you're misfiring now.
I know that you didn't mean to be worried about that thing tomorrow, which you totally don't need to be worried about.
And you've worried about last night and you worried about the night before, and I tried to get you to not worry about it, but I appreciate that you're there looking out for me.
I understand where this comes from.
Yeah, it's treating yourself like an ancestor that you should be helping.
Yeah, yeah, I like that way of thinking about it.
It's basically seeing the utility of the stuff that initially seems harmful to you.
It's yes, you can recognize the harm, you can recognize the pain, but then it is also helpful to recognize the utility and the functionality.
And I do think that for many of us, like, if you're the kind of person who likes explanations and understanding stuff, well, then understanding why something appears irrational, but is underlain by deeper adaptive logic, that itself takes some of the chaos and confusion and pain out of it.
I learned from you about a trait that I'd never heard of before need for cognition?
Is that what it's called?
Can you can you explain that?
Yeah, so that's a personality trait or an individual difference that describes the extent to which you enjoy thinking about challenging things like working on puzzles, like understanding stuff, like explanations, you enjoy explaining things or understanding things.
And I think I was probably talking about it in this context.
And I was saying that these insights may help some of us take this sting out of our negative emotions, especially those people who are who are higher in need for cognition, who enjoy explanation and comprehension, and who feel a need to understand, like if you're not just dealing with sadness, but you're
constantly asking yourself, why am I like this?
Why do I have the hedonic treadmill?
Then these insights help you to explain that and you can put it to rest.
Okay, you're not weird.
Your brain's not pathological.
It's working as intended.
And that might provide some solace, especially for those who are like seeking answers and high in need for cognition.
I think so. I think that's probably every single person in this audience listening.
Yeah. I felt my love for evolutionary psychology began with Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, which I think still now in 35 years old, that book, probably something like that, still 33 years old, still holds up like it's still so cool.
Still such a great read.
And then he wrote another one called Why Buddhism is True.
And in it, he quotes this Buddhist thinker who says, ultimately in life, happiness comes down to the decision between choosing to become aware of our mental afflictions or the decision to be ruled by them.
And for me, the becoming aware of your mental afflictions is always the more satisfactory answer.
I just, I think I'm very much that person, that need for cognition, that closing the loop on understanding why I get it, I get it.
Like I feel this way, I feel this way, but why, even if you have a coping mechanism for it, even if you've done the mindfulness or your CBT or your breath work or your sauna or your cold plunge or whatever, even if you have a coping mechanism to be able to re -regulate yourself, I think there's still
for a big number of people of which I'm one, this degree of frustration that you can't work out where it's coming from.
Like why is that there?
And I think that in that need for cognition, that need for explanation, really does sort of lie at the bottom of much of what I've done for like the last seven years of my life, which is just trying to work out why I am the way I am and why humans are the way that we are.
And every time that I get a new answer, I feel a little more satisfied.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, a related thing is that I think a lot of us tend to place emotions in this dichotomy with cognition, where it's like emotions versus cognition.
Emotions are irrational.
Cognition is rational.
Emotions are hot. Cognition is cold.
Emotions are impulsive.
Cognition is reflective.
And that contributes to us thinking of emotions as something that needs to be reigned in or controlled.
And I mean, yes, it can be beneficial to reframe emotions, to revise or modify them when we experience them acting in the wrong times or to the wrong degree.
But one of the useful things that we can do is drop the dichotomy and realize that emotions like cognition are complex information processing instantiated in the nervous system that evolved for a reason.
And you know, we talked about instances where it'll seem irrational, like the hedonic treadmill, but it's really not.
One way of thinking about this is that it's not irrational, it's adaptively rational.
And that surface level irrationality actually has a deeper logic to it.
Oh, so just sorry, just what you're saying is that one implication is, if you can't see the adaptive rationality, which appears in terms of its first order for you as irrationality, this insight, if you have this need for cognition, you're able to collapse those two together, so that you don't have this discordance
between the two. Well, this isn't irrational.
I'm aware that it's maybe misfiring, but I even understand why the misfiring is there.
Yeah. So I mean, maybe you're collapsing, or maybe you're holding both in mind together, and you're acknowledging both, which I think is healthier than either always vilifying emotions, or always the other error is always saying, Oh, emotions are full of ancestral wisdom, always trust your emotions.
And that's wrong too.
Like we don't want blanket vilification.
And we don't want blanket always self help trust your emotions.
What we want is a more nuanced approach where we can go on a case by case basis, we can decide if the emotion is serving us or not.
And if it's not, we can try to reframe or we can try to use that some of the tools that you were talking about to adjust it.
But it's important to realize both the good that they do and the bad that they do and be able to hold them both in mind at once, rather than blanket vilifying or blanket self help trusting.
What about anger? Anger.
Anger is one of the most vilified, because it does lead to a lot of problems.
At the same time, it evolved for a reason.
And the theory I'm going to refer to here is a lot of this work was done by someone named Aaron cell.
And he thinks of anger as a device for negotiating with others who haven't placed enough value on our welfare.
Like when we feel that we're being mistreated, or we feel that a friend or a loved one or whoever is not placing enough emphasis on our well being, we express anger in a way to bargain with them or negotiate with them for better treatment in the future.
And we're like what anger is basically saying is, treat me better or I will impose costs on you.
Or if you're already in a collaborative relationship with that person, treat me better or I will withhold benefits from you until you treat me better.
And there's no doubt that anger leads to problems, lots of problems, but it also evolved for a reason and organisms without anger would not do very well, they would not advocate in these kind of dyadic relationships for their interests.
In fact, I think, you know, there's this notion that if only we could be free of emotions, we'd be so intelligent and so rational.
But organisms without emotions, creatures without emotions would be stupider than us, not smarter, they'd be less capable of intelligent action.
How so? Well, they wouldn't avoid infection.
Well, they wouldn't advocate for their interests in dyadic relationships.
Well, they wouldn't be able to avoid the limitations of the moment and build long term relationships, they wouldn't repair things with others when they had hurt them, they wouldn't escape predators, they would be like, Oh, that cliff, it's not a problem, we try to slide down and see what happens without
emotions. I mean, it's like pain organisms, some people are born with without pain congenitally, and they're usually dead by 30 or 30 something organisms that have areas of their brain devoted to fear, often die early.
I mean, if you take a rat or a mouse and you lesion the part of its brain that's involved in fear, it will no longer be afraid of the smell of cat piss, and it'll go right up to cats and it'll get eaten.
And so emotions or creatures without emotions would be less capable of intelligent action in the world, not more.
Actually, there's another cool example of this, which is there are patients with brain damage to parts of their brain that are involved in emotion, like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
And these patients have trouble making even very simple decisions, like where to sit in an auditorium or where to go to dinner or what appointment to make for their next medical appointment.
I seem to remember a study being done with a guy who had this and they asked what time did he want to come back tomorrow, and sat and observed him for 30 minutes or something.
Is it 3pm or is it 4pm?
Yeah, that's a classic example.
And so the Damasio, the neuroscientist who did some of this work, asked, as you said, the patient when he wanted to come back this date or that date.
And so the patient took out his notebook and started listing all the pros and cons of each group for 30 minutes, unable to decide on which one.
And eventually Damasio just said, why don't you come on the second day?
And the guy was like, okay, done.
And so that this person was still intelligent.
He was still lucid.
He was still rational, but he was incapable of making the decision because sometimes emotional inputs, like a slight preference for that day over this day is what helps us make the decision.
When you look at which chair to sit in in an auditorium, there often isn't a huge objective difference between the chairs, but you have a slight emotional preference for one over the other and that helps you make the decision.
And so without emotions, if we have brain damage like this patient, we find ourselves unable sometimes to make even trivial, mundane decisions.
What about when we feel emotions about our emotions?
Say that again. What about when we feel emotions about our emotions?
Ah, yeah. For me, I think of this often, I sometimes think of them as second order emotions.
Like I am frustrated with myself for being anxious or I'm annoyed with myself for the hedonic treadmill.
And, you know, emotions are normally like fairly short lasting, but you can renew them if you have a thought that triggers the emotion again.
Like often when you're angry about something, the initial episode of anger will be fairly short, a few seconds, a few minutes.
The reason it can go on for much longer than that is that you've re -experienced the external trigger or the internal trigger of thinking about the thing that made you angry.
And so you've basically renewed the emotion.
And so this is one of the reasons why cognitive reframing is important because you can try to stop renewing the emotion.
But for the second order emotions, what kinds of examples were you thinking of?
The ones that you used.
So frustration at myself for being so anxious, a degree of guilt about something despite the fact that I probably don't need to feel guilty about it, like a sense of shame around something, and then frustration at the guilt and self resentment at the shame.
And then, you know, you get a third order one, which is like being bored at your agitation, at your persistent anxiety.
Yeah, sometimes we flagellate ourselves for emotions with more painful emotions.
To me, it really helps to understand why the emotions are there in the way that we were talking about earlier.
I think that takes a lot of this sting out of the second order self flagellation.
If you understand why the hedonic treadmill exists, it makes total sense.
You no longer need to be pissed at yourself for feeling it.
If you understand that sadness serves a function, and it's not weird of you to feel sad when you're stuck in a dead end marriage or job, then you don't need to berate yourself for feeling sad.
If you understand why anxiety is hyperactive by design, well, you can try to regulate your anxiety, but you don't need to beat yourself up for feeling anxiety.
And so to me, and I hope this helps others as well, the insights for why the thing exists and why it's functional helps us to feel less bad and beat ourselves up less for feeling it in the first place.
But I do want to add something about shame, which is pretty cool, which is, as you said, feeling shame about something that you don't need to feel shame about.
There is this really cool research where the experimenters set up a bunch of experiments where they tease apart whether or not participants had actually done anything wrong from whether or not audience members thought they had done something wrong.
And they were able to show very clearly that participants felt shame even when they were innocent and when they knew they were innocent, as long as audience members thought they were guilty.
And what's so great about that, I mean, it's kind of sad, but what's so great about it for our purposes pedagogically is that it really shows that shame is not about being culpable, about having done something wrong necessarily.
It's about falling in status in the eyes of your peers, about being rejected or ostracized or devalued by your peers.
So you can absolutely feel shame when you're innocent and you know you're innocent, as long as you think correctly or erroneously that others are devaluing you.
And that's a major insight.
And it does, people who are feeling shame may be entirely innocent, but they may be thinking correctly or incorrectly that others are devaluing them for whatever.
Yeah, it's optics management, brand management, I must control the narrative.
Yeah, I mean, that's such a, what a ruthless little byproduct of our emotions that we can do something, we can do nothing wrong, or we can do something which isn't wrong and still be at the mercy of a group who is wrong in judging us for having done something wrong, even when we didn't.
Yeah, I think about this a lot, you know, the rise and fall and re -rise of internet personalities and politicians and cultural commentators and authors and who's at heart and who's not and who's in and who's out.
And so much of it is optics.
So there does tend to be very little smoke without some fire in one form or another, but so much of it can run away with itself.
Somebody's reputation can precede them both in a positive sense or increasingly on the internet, I think in a bad sense.
And yeah, I really do think that reputation management in that way is just so important because the, this sort of new hologram projection of you, very much is what people experience.
Like we and in a world as well, where people are very quick to jump to conclusions and not do their own research.
Well, we know that this is the fact.
It's like, I don't think that that's the case.
And also the implications not only for you, not only for everybody else and their assumptions, but for the person in their felt experience of day -to -day existence as well is pretty drastic.
So I think, yeah, we should maybe all pump the brakes a little bit on judging other people too harshly, especially with imperfect information.
Yeah. And then if I can add something, I think that, you know, some people listening might think, you know, reputation management, like it's, it might seem superficial or not that important, but really reputation and acceptance by your peers, that would have meant the difference between surviving and not surviving
in the environments that we evolved in.
You know, if you're cast out of the group, you're not going to be able to hunt and build shelters and fires and fend off predators alone in the environments in which we evolved.
So it would have meant death.
And so falling in the eyes of one's peers can be extremely painful and some of the worst punishments that we have to offer are basically kicking a person out of the group, right?
You've got ostracism, exile, revoking citizenship, in prison, the worst thing is solitary confinement, dishonorable discharge.
These kinds of things are some of the most painful things that can happen to us or that we can do to each other, kicking someone out of the group.
And there are studies that clearly show that the amount of pain felt at being excluded, even when it's a simple virtual game, you bring participants into the lab, and they're passing a ball to one another, and they don't get the ball passed to them.
And it's not even other people passing the ball, it's CPUs, they still feel pain.
And so it's like, it's not a superficial thing.
It's like, very poignant and felt and powerful.
And there are reasons why it is like that.
Are there any other interesting elements that you don't think that we've covered when we start to scale up emotions into a group context, when it comes to group cohesion, social status, our place within it, the way that sort of emotions move through groups, especially with reputation and stuff like
that? Is there anything interesting there?
Um, I think that some of the positive emotions get understudied and at least don't get, you know, the function of some of the positive emotions is less obvious than the function of fear or disgust, for example.
And so, as you mentioned earlier, for people who think that there are some basic emotions and some non -basic emotions, they never talk about like romantic love and parental love, for example, as basic emotions, but these are universal emotions that every culture has, and that evolve to serve a very
clear function, one of them being pair bonding, the other one being raising and protecting offspring.
So there are very important emotions that are either groupish or dyadic or in some way social that are positive, that are functional, that are universal, that get, um, maybe not ignored but understudied because they're not as obvious as what the other function is not as obvious as some of the basic
survival related emotions.
Um, I think, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of emotions that we haven't talked about and there's also linking, you can link emotions to so many different aspects of psychology and behavior because if you adopt the coordinating mechanisms approach or modes of operation approach that we're talking about here,
that makes emotions not some weird quirky part of the mind, it makes them a very central part of psychology and behavior because they organize or orchestrate so many different aspects of psychology and physiology and behavior.
So they're involved in everything from friendship to punishment to forgiveness to warfare to loving your children to hatred to murder.
I mean, emotions are, they pervade all aspects of human life and everything we do.
And at one point they were kind of considered a fringe topic of study, but I think with the realization that they pervade everything we do and the fact that they're adaptive, um, is now coming in appreciation that they are central to how the mind works and to psychology.
What are some of the emotions that I've missed off from my, these should probably be interesting list.
We did discuss pride and shame briefly.
We discussed the distinction between guilt and shame.
We, did we discuss the distinction between envy and jealousy?
No, we didn't. Okay.
So, you know, jealousy for protecting your valued relationships is usually discussed in the context of romantic relationships, but there can be friendship, jealousy to protecting your valuable friendships from, uh, friendship poachers or from loss.
Uh, whereas envy is about wanting that thing that somebody else has that you don't have, maybe coveting that corner office or cars or increased status or whatever pride and shame can be thought of as sort of flips of each other.
One of them about engaging in stuff that helps with social valuation and advertising it to the shame about not engaging in stuff that results in social devaluation.
And if you have, trying to hide that from the group or engage in damage control discussed for protecting from pathogens, fear from protecting for other dangers.
On the, uh, on the discussed point, actually, you, you mentioned about, um, sexual arousal kind of being muted in dampened down, uh, which makes complete sense.
Are you, did you see any research about post pandemic or during pandemic sexual activity?
Because I, I had this pet theory in my mind that with a pathogen out there, with all of the news, everyone's really worried.
You can see where I'm going with this, that maybe we would have this sort of global turnoff, uh, for everybody's, uh, everyone's desire for sex, especially sexual variety.
Now, obviously you, it's not like the only emotion that we have is discussed.
You also have a desire for novelty, which is being curtailed by you being locked in your house for 18 months.
And then you may be that, that's a stronger sense of cabin fever, whatever.
Um, but yeah, I just, I kind of had it in my head.
I thought that would be maybe something that we would have seen increase pathogen concern, more heightened discussed response.
We also know, uh, that this is, uh, sext it's, it's, not equal between the sexes.
I think women have a more sensitive, discussed response than men do.
Um, was there anything interesting that came out about that?
I haven't seen research on that, but I think that that's a reasonable supposition, a reasonable prediction.
We do know from research that if you experimentally discussed participants, they, their desire for sexual variety and novelty goes down, like bring them into the lab, show them disgusting things.
They will experience a downturn in interest in short -term mating and interest in new partners, interest in sexual variety.
We also know that if you look globally at different regions of the world, some have higher pathogen prevalence than others, often because of temperature, you know, because certain pathogens do better in warmer climates than in colder ones.
And that this is correlated with interest in short -term mating and extraversion and openness to experience, whereby people who grew up in more pathogen dense parts of the world tend to be less interested in this kind of sexual exploration, which makes sense.
Um, and given all that, I think your prediction makes sense, but I didn't see anything specific on it.
I was reading morbidly curious.
If you've read that, it's a, uh, psychologist that looks at sort of, uh, morbid stuff and, um, Colton Scrivner.
Do you know that guy?
Yeah. Yeah. And he was talking about, um, why some women find serial killers attractive.
And I thought that, uh, that was like an interesting sex difference.
I don't know of many men who, while also you don't have a massively big pool of female serial killers, uh, but I thought that that was, that was an interesting pivot away from much of what we've spoken about.
And then a lot that people can probably infer about this sex difference of the fragility, the reason that women tend to use sort of venting and gossip and like interpersonal fuckery as opposed to their fists to try and settle disputes or work out the pecking order within some social hierarchy that they're
just a little bit, not much, but a lot of women think, well, you have this very reliable, like you literally know, like it's defined his job title is serial killer.
Um, and I thought that was an interesting element, but I guess with much of what we're talking about here, uh, one other part I wanted to get into was the sort of concept of spandrels or the idea that there are, well, actually you can explain spandrels better than me because I'm going to mess it up.
Sure. Spandrels are, are sometimes called byproducts and it's the idea that, you know, not everything in the human mind or body is an adaptation that evolved for a reason.
Some things are just side effects or byproducts.
And you know, to give a silly example, if we look at my, my fingers here, the negative space in between my fingers that forms a V that V didn't evolve for any reason.
It's simply a byproduct of the structure of my fingers.
And there's plenty of byproducts in the human brain and body and mind.
Um, the whiteness of bones, bones didn't evolve to be white because it helps to fend off predators or to attract mates.
It's just a side effect of the calcium.
The redness of blood didn't evolve because it's attractive or protects you from pathogens, just a side effect of the hemoglobin.
And so spandrel is an architectural term for, again, a byproduct of a couple of architectural features.
Then when put together yield this, uh, this byproduct.
And this term comes up in discussions of when we're looking at human biology, psychology, and behavior, and we're asking, is this thing an evolved feature?
Is it an adaptation that serves an evolved function?
Or is it merely a byproduct, a side effect or concomitant?
That's where the term spandrel comes up.
What are your favorite postulated spandrels when it comes to the world of human behavior and emotions?
Um, so some, some famous ones, one is, uh, belief in religion and gods is sometimes, some people try to explain it as an adaptation.
Like that evolved for a reason and serves a function, but some people explain it as an, as a byproduct, a byproduct of, for example, hyperactive agency detection, where you see agents in the world, even when there aren't any, and of the attachment system.
What I mean by hyperactive agency detection is, for example, if you're walking by and there's a rustle in the bush, you could think that something is there that caused it when really it was just the wind.
That's one error you could make, or you could make the other error of thinking that it was just the wind when there was something in the bush that caused it.
Now, the more dangerous of the two errors is to think that, oh, it was just the wind when there's actually an agent there that might be hiding, hiding there and waiting to hurt you, could be an animal, could be a hostile human.
And so we tend, we have a tendency to hyperperceive agency, to detect agents even when there aren't any.
We see nefarious dealings, even when things happen by chance.
We think somebody made the noise in the bush.
We think that there's somebody behind this, even when it might've happened just because of chance factors or happened without an agent.
Even in natural selection, people think of mother nature is doing the selecting.
They think there's an agent who's doing the selecting, when in reality there is no agent and there's no active selection.
It's a passive process whereby some organisms survive and reproduce more than others.
But we take these passive processes and we tend to read agents into them.
We tend to see hidden agents in them.
Some thinkers have said, well, that may be relevant to religion because when you see the thunder and the flood and the famine or other things that happen, you may think there's an agent behind these things trying to punish you or reward you or whatever.
And so some people have viewed religious belief as a by -product in that way.
Some people have viewed murder or killing as a by -product because again, there's usually debates about all of this stuff.
Some people think that that kind of aggression, including murder, could have evolved for adaptive reasons.
But other people think it is just slips of people going too far where aggression evolved, but it wasn't meant to result in murder.
But when you get involved in an aggressive encounter, you can go too far.
The mechanism can get over -triggered and can result in murder.
And so famously, evolutionary psychologists Martin Daley and Margo Wilson proposed that murder and other kinds of killing, such as killing one's children or one's stepchildren, are essentially by -products, they said, of a failure of mechanisms of parental love to activate sufficiently.
So they were looking at all this data showing that stepchildren were abused and killed at a much higher rate than biological children.
And they were trying to emphasize that their hypothesis isn't that people have evolved an adaptation to kill those stepchildren, but rather that when the normal mechanisms of parental love and attachment are not engaged and triggered as fully, then you can get as a slip -up or side effect or by -product,
you can get murder as a result.
Some people have pointed out the distinction between how we learn to speak language and how we learn to read and write language.
We learn to speak language very, very easily.
We don't really need to be taught much.
Put a kid in an environment where he can listen to normal language and he will develop normal language.
By contrast, reading and writing take a lot of formal education and a lot of work and are much harder to accomplish.
Why the difference?
Some have theorized that it's because we have an adaptation for speaking and comprehending spoken language, but written language is a more recent evolutionary and cultural innovation and that's why it's so much harder to teach and harder to learn and that it is a by -product of mechanisms that we actually
evolved for spoken language.
Oh, that's so interesting.
Kind of like how you could look if you didn't know that humans evolved for a big long time and you saw a human sat on a bicycle and you'd say, look at the bicycle, it perfectly fits the human and you go, yeah, but they had to design it that way and then they had to learn to be able to use the bicycle
and actually those feet, they're supposed to work in a different way.
I know that they're there and I know that they fit the bike, but they're actually there to do a very different thing.
Yeah, so those are some by -products.
In the world of emotions, I'm sure that there are by -products for every given emotion in terms of what side effects they yield, but each emotion in and of itself seems to have evolved for a reason and seems to be geared toward solving a problem.
So, you know, we can talk about anger misfiring and we can talk about anxiety being triggered by things that it didn't really need to be triggered by, but anger nonetheless as an overall emotion as a system evolved for a reason and anxiety as an overall system evolved for a reason.
And so I think the distinction for us when we look at these emotions is often the system will have evolved to serve a function, but it can still misfire, it can still be overactive or underactive, it can still maybe have a too sensitive threshold for being triggered, or it can be triggered in the wrong
context. And so there are certainly ways in which the emotion can misfire and misfire maladaptively while the system itself still is functional and evolved for a reason.
But that's true of our immune systems, that's true of our memory, you know, these things evolved for a reason, they can still make mistakes and misfire as well.
Beyond the insight that your understanding of your emotions and where they come from can help you to not feel so personally cursed in having to deal with these things even when they get it wrong, or they fire when you don't want them to.
How else have you applied your work to your own life when it comes to dealing with wanted or unwanted emotions, mitigating them, prolonging them, allowing yourself to make better decisions?
What are some of the other things that your works helped you in?
The main thing I think is in issuing both dangers of an over vilification of emotions or an over acceptance of the wisdom embedded in them and replacing that blanket good or blanket bad approach with a case by case nuanced approach where I try to look at each emotion and think why it's there and what its
function is and whether or not in this instance, it's useful.
Because again, as we said, you know, the emotion can be useful doesn't mean that in this instance, it's being useful.
And so if you take something like sadness, for example, you know, for most of us when we experience sadness, the tendency is like to distract from it or run away from it or medicate it.
And what this kind of this kind of approach instead would say, well, let's sit with it for a minute.
Let's see what kind of ruminations it's throwing at us.
Let's see if it's telling us to quit any paths we're on that are not working stuck in an abusive relationship stuck stuck in a dead -end job.
Is it helping me to reallocate my resources elsewhere and telling me that this thing isn't working and I need to quit?
If so, well, then it's useful.
But if instead, I can't identify any trigger for it, it is persistent, it is interfering with my ability to do my job and love my loved ones and it is messing up my life.
Well, then it's maladaptive and I should try to, in that case, reframe it cognitively or meditate or exercise or take medication or whatever.
But for each emotion that crops up, you can begin by asking what's the function in the purpose?
And then in this instance, is it serving that function or in this instance, is it misfiring?
And then you can also ask, has it gotten to the point where it is interfering with my life and making me unable to do my stuff or is it actually helping me to recalibrate and solve a problem?
And then you can decide whether it needs to be interrogated and revised and reframed or if it's actually offering you some wisdom.
So it's kind of like a, it's a bit of a boring answer because it's saying each one on a case by case basis and acknowledge the good and the bad of each one, which sounds like, well, I mean, it sounds both a little boring, a little obvious, but the truth of the matter is that that's probably what's going
to get us the best response rather than the way that some people tend to either vilify emotions as irrational or think that you should always trust your emotions because they always have ancestral wisdom embedded in them.
Well, certainly beyond the emotion, the emotion can occur or not.
One thing, the more levels of degrees of separation that you get away from the original emotion, the more I think that you are culpable for what's going on.
So look, a thing happens and you got anxious, but what about your frustration at your anxiousness?
And what about your shame at your frustration about your anxiousness?
Like the more that you stack up there, I think, okay, I may not have been able to step into this largely system one style, like out of nowhere thinking, but I come on, I cannot castigate myself for being anxious or I cannot get agitated at my castigation about myself about being anxious.
You know, I think that that really not vilifying or deifying emotions sort of too much, I think is cool.
Certainly for me, I'm one of the journeys I've been on over the last year or so since spending a good bit of time in therapy has been to actually embrace emotions more.
I think those of us that were kind of, I don't know, seduced by the new atheist rationalists, secular worldview, I'm going to learn all the cognitive biases.
And once I've got a glossary of all of the 150 most likely ones, I'm basically going to be a perfectly rational human.
And you realize after a while that you're, I mean, Daniel Kahneman famously said, you know, after an entire career of studying human biases, are you any more rational?
And he said, no, you know, this guy's got a fucking Nobel Prize.
So if he's not going to do it, I'm not going to do it.
And trying to embrace as, as you mentioned about the gentleman in the study who couldn't work out whether I wanted to come on Tuesday or Wednesday to the next appointment, trying to think about the wisdom that does come up, trying to sort of embrace, get the cerebral horsepower, cognitive shit, tune
that down a little bit.
I think that's probably for those of us with my newly, new favorite need for cognition personality trait.
I think that's probably something we could all do with doing a bit more.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think you're probably right that we can exert a good amount of control over the second and third order emotions when we're like, berating and castigating ourselves for our emotions.
It's interesting, I think when we speak to our friends too, we often say like, don't do that to yourself, like don't make yourself feel bad for feeling anxious.
Like we can talk about the anxiety and whether it's warranted or not.
But independently, don't be make don't be mad at yourself for feeling anxious, just accept that your anxiety was triggered by this thing.
And now let's see whether it needs to be reframed or not.
But don't add a layer of beating yourself up for it.
I think we intuitively do it that with our friends.
And we can do that with ourselves too.
You know, there is one other thing that comes to mind, it's a little bit of a digression.
But I think it's kind of an important way of thinking about it, which is it's again, the distinction between the system is adaptive, but it can misfire the system is adaptive, but it can lead to outputs that are maladaptive.
And this isn't just emotions.
This is true in a lot of different cases.
I mean, if you look, for example, at foster birds that have brood parasite chicks deposited in their nest, so these are other birds that deposit their eggs in someone else's nest, so that this foster parent can unwittingly raise these parasite chicks, you sometimes see the foster parent feeding and raising
the chicken and you think, why is it doing that that is so maladaptive, that it's raising this offspring that has been foisted upon it.
And if you think not about the individual behavior of tolerating this chick and you instead think about the neurocognitive mechanisms that exist in this bird's brain, when it has to deal with parasite chicks, there's two kinds of errors it could make.
It could be overly tolerant and tolerate the occasional chick, or it could make a mistake and push one of its offspring out the nest and kill it.
And often, the safer error is to over tolerate rather than risk killing your own offspring, especially if you're in a species or in an ecology that doesn't have that much parasitism going on.
And so, it's like, yes, you look at the behavior of raising the foster, the parasite chick, and you think that behavior is individually maladaptive, but the system that produced it is super adaptive.
The neurocognitive mechanism in the bird's brain that produced that is super adaptive because by engaging in that error, sometimes it doesn't have to engage in the more catastrophic error.
And so, like, occasionally when we look at individual outputs, we need to either average in our minds across the entire sample space of the behaviors produced by that mechanism, or we need to think about the distinction between the output and the mechanism.
The neurocognitive mechanism in the brain is adaptive, even if this individual output is maladaptive.
And I don't know if other people will care about that distinction, but to me, I find it very helpful in organizing my thinking.
Oh, yeah. Laith, you're great.
I love the work that you've done.
You've got a new Oxford Handbook of Emotions out.
You've got a bunch of other stuff going on.
Where should people go?
They want to keep up to date with all of your work.
Yeah, thanks. They can go to my website, which is www .laithalshof .com, spelled L -A -I -T -H -A -L -S -H -A -W -A -F.
I've got all my popular science articles linked there.
And then can I plug this book that you just mentioned?
Absolutely. Cool. Yeah.
Look at that absolute monster.
So this is a 1400 page book.
We're very happy with the way it came out.
It's got almost 70 chapters in it, and if anybody's interested in emotions, it was several years in the making and we're really pleased with how it came out.
And the cover is phenomenal as well.
I'm aware that if it's got 70 chapters, the cover is like maybe not most of what the work was.
But I still think it's beautiful too.
Yeah, I'm really glad with the work they did with the cover.
But point being, if people are interested in emotions, this is a book maybe to check out from your library or tell your university library to get a copy.
Otherwise, people can find me on Twitter or X where my handle is at Laithal Shoaaf.
Again, L -A -I -T -H -A -L -S -H -A -W -A -F.
And yeah, I hope people get interested in emotions.
I think there will be after today.
I appreciate you, mate.
Thank you. Thanks a lot, Chris.
