This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
In 1965, Mark Rudd was an 18 -year -old freshman at Columbia University in New York.
America's military involvement in Vietnam was ramping up.
At first, Mark wasn't interested in much beyond his studies.
But before long, he was drawn in by the passion of his politically engaged peers.
He would later write, over beers or a joint, I'd listened to discussions about China's cultural revolution, then just starting, and to Cuba's seven -year -old revolution.
It was thrilling to be with these people who were tapping into something so much bigger than ourselves, something so grand, so historic, remaking the world.
By the time he was 20, he had been elected chairman of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS.
In 1968, he led the student occupation of several university buildings.
He called his parents, exhilarated.
We took a building, he exclaimed.
Well, give it back, his father told him.
But Mark was drawn deeper into radicalism.
Along with some friends, he formed a revolutionary band known as the Weather Underground.
The group sought to violently overthrow the government and instigated a string of bombings.
The violence gave Mark pause, but he felt compelled to continue.
I felt like a member of the crew on a speeding train, dimly aware of disaster ahead, but unable to put on the brakes, he would later recall.
Decades later, Mark Rudd said he had feelings of guilt and shame about his actions.
He told a pair of documentary filmmakers, these are things that I am not proud of.
Few of us become violent revolutionaries like Mark Rudd, but most of us know what it's like to be part of an energized, passionate group.
This week on Hidden Brain, we kick off a new series called Emotions 2 .0.
We start today with a special double -header episode.
We look at what happens to our brains when we get caught up in a crowd and then explore how these ideas shape cultures and societies around the world.
The line between different disciplines in the social sciences can be blurry.
Anthropologists, psychologists, economists, and sociologists all study human behavior, but they use different lenses and different terminologies.
Our focus on this show is to explore human behavior in daily life.
We look at what animates individuals, when they are happy and when they are sad, and how people can bring about change in their lives.
At Harvard Business School, the psychologist Amit Goldenberg studies why we feel what we feel, but the lens he uses takes a step back from individual minds to how groups think, feel, and act.
Amit Goldenberg, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
Amit, I understand that you grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home.
One of the most important dates on the calendar was the holiday of Yom Kippur.
What did the day signify for you?
Yom Kippur was a really special day for us.
I remember I used to be scared of that day.
I felt that this was a really important day in determining the future or the next year for me, whether it's going to be a good year or a bad year.
And so I wanted to get to that day in the right mindset and in the right way and do the right prayers and get ready in the right way.
So you have a vivid memory of fasting for Yom Kippur when you were just 10 years old.
Can you paint me a picture of what you did, what you saw and what you heard that day?
Yeah, so traditionally, children start to fast when they're 13 after their bar mitzvah.
But I really wanted to try.
So that was my first big attempt.
And the first evening was kind of easy, but already in the morning I was completely weak and I could barely stand.
And there's a special prayer which is the heart of that day, which is all about atonement.
It talks about the decision that God has to make.
And so it says, How many shall pass away and how many shall be born?
Who shall live and who shall die?
Who's by water and who's by fire?
And so I was always anxious about this prayer because it kind of very vividly portrays the future of various people.
But there's also something very calming in feeling this anxiety with other people, something very protected.
So as a community, we're praying for everyone's verdict rather than my own personal verdict.
And I think it's one of the first times that I acknowledge how strong collective experiences could be.
So more than a century ago, the sociologist Emil Durkheim talked about an idea as people go through things together.
They experience something that he called collective effervescence.
How is this connected, do you think, to what you felt at age 10?
Oh, very much connected.
Durkheim is one of the most influential thinkers for me.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Durkheim also focused on religious ceremonies because I do think that they represent some of the strongest collective emotional experience.
But one thing that was missing and that became part of my goal as a researcher was to kind of try to unpack that experience.
What does that mean to feel effervescence?
There's obviously a sense of togetherness, but there are also very specific processes that are occurring as groups feel emotions together that tend to lead to this feeling of effervescence.
I want to talk about a second example in your life that showed you the power of collective or shared emotions.
As a young adult living in Israel, Amit, you became an activist.
You often engaged in protests against the policies of the Israeli government.
One of these demonstrations took place in a neighborhood of Jerusalem.
What was the trigger for the protest and what happened?
Yeah, so, like many Israelis, I was always conflicted by feeling strong identity to the country that I am at and feeling a strong sense to serve the country, but also feeling very strong negative emotions about some of the policies that are being taken by the Israeli government.
And one of the experiences that are the strongest to me is an event that took place in Jerusalem in a Palestinian side of Jerusalem called Shech Jarach, where a family of Palestinians were evicted from their homes.
And I remember watching the videos of what's happening in their house a few days after the event, which took place in August 2009.
And I was absolutely furious.
I can still think about those videos, and it makes me angry just to talk about it.
And there was nothing I could do about it.
There's nothing no one could do about it, I mean, other than demonstrate.
And there were already demonstrations about this happening in Jerusalem.
I was living at the time at Tel Aviv.
And I remember getting a ride to the demonstration, and I just wanted to express kind of rage and anger with other people.
What's interesting is when I got there, I realized something very interesting.
Yes, there was a lot of rage, and expressing it with other people was a great feeling, but there was also a lot of positive emotions.
People were also interacting with each other, laughing and having fun.
And I remember thinking that you need to have both in some ways, the possibility to feel anger with other people, and that feels good.
But also to normalize the situation, so that people will have the energy to keep going.
And I came back to demonstrate every Friday for almost a year, and it really kept me going.
And it's clear that what brought you back was not just your feelings about the injustice about what happened, but also the sense that you were among other people who shared your concerns.
That's right. One of the unique things about collective emotions is that feeling negative emotions together, even if these emotions that are typically unpleasant at the individual level, doing it with other people feels good.
And that's a strong reason for why people join together to demonstrate and to generate collective action processes.
Because despite of the fact that in many cases this is driven by negative experiences, it also feels really good to do it with other people.
There was a third moment in your life when you noticed that what you were feeling was closely tied up with what others were feeling.
You were doing some investigative work on companies and paying close attention to the stock market.
Something unusual happened on May 6, 2010.
What kind of work were you doing, Amit, and what happened that day?
Yeah, so I worked as a journalist in Israel, and I did some investigative journalism, including work on companies in Israel.
And I was hired by an American company to do some analytic work related to the stock markets at around 2010.
And so it was the first time that really my personal wellness was connected to the stock market.
And for those of you whose job is to look at the stock market all day, you know that the volatility of the market has a huge effect on one's own emotions.
What happened on May 6, 2010 is called the Flash Crash, and it started at 2 .32 p .m.
Eastern time, and it lasted approximately 30 minutes.
And during that time, the Dow Jones dropped about 9%, which is a huge drop.
And the crash was triggered by a large sell order of these S &P 500 future contracts that were amplified by some algorithm.
The details don't matter as much, but what happened was a huge decline in the stock market, and no one knew why.
And I remember seeing it happening, there was no apparent reason, but everybody was sure that someone knows something that they didn't.
So internet forms of stock investors were complete chaos, starting all sorts of rumors as stock continued to fall.
And I remember realizing the power of this financial panic, and I was panicking as well, and it was one of those short but pivotal moments, I think, that I realized that I didn't want my emotions to be tied to the state of the stock market.
And you know, soon after that, I applied to grad school and became a researcher of that phenomenon.
But I vividly remember that experience.
I mean, I'm thinking about the hours after the 9 -11 attacks in the United States, you know, a couple of decades ago.
I remember working at a newspaper in Washington at the time, and, you know, the first few hours were so chaotic because it was not quite clear what was happening, who knew what.
And there was a sense that things were unfolding that were larger than you and much more powerful than you that you didn't understand, and that produced incredible fear and incredible rumors about fresh horrors that were about to unfold.
For sure. There's also a really interesting thing happened in September 11, which was after the first plane hit the towers, there was a huge anticipated affect.
You know, what is going to happen next?
Is it going to be the end of it?
And there's a lot of really interesting works showing that anticipated affect is actually stronger in intensity than the actual thing.
And so people were not only kind of responding to what happened, but also extremely anxious of what is about to happen.
And I think that makes things so much stronger.
I want to go a little bit further back in history.
During World War II, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and shortly after that, fears about Japanese Americans spread like wildfire across the United States.
You know, it's somewhat hard to imagine today, but thousands upon thousands of Japanese American citizens were rounded up and interned in camps.
In some ways, this is at a much larger level the same phenomenon that you saw at the stock market, that you saw at your protests in Jerusalem, the same idea magnified many times.
Absolutely. You know, when groups feel panic and rage, they tend to, just like individuals, they tend to focus their attention sometimes on the wrong things and make decisions that sometimes are extremely destructive, that they would never have made these decisions without these emotions.
And one of the things about collectives feeling these emotions is that it's not only that they feel these emotions, but they don't have any motivation to regulate them.
In many cases, when individuals feel negative emotions, they don't want to feel those emotions.
So helping people regulate involves harnessing their basic motivation.
But in these collective situations, when groups feel emotions like rage or fear, they really want to feel those emotions because it feels good to express these emotions together.
And so if you want to regulate them, you really need to find ways to bypass this motivational limitations.
In the last few years, me and a lot of other people are trying to think about ways, creative ways to overcome these motivational hurdles, to reduce collective anger, anxiety and fear, and to increase hope in some of those very desperate situations.
Because the outcomes can be so destructive that any form of regulation may be a huge help.
When I think about my emotions, I usually think about the emotions that I am feeling.
My happiness, my anger, my gratitude.
Most of us don't think about emotions as collective experiences.
But as Amit had seen on multiple occasions in his own life, emotions are in fact shared.
They are experienced collectively.
In time, he was to learn that when emotions are shared, they can take on a life of their own and have surprising effects on us.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Amit Goldenberg is a psychologist at Harvard Business School.
He studies what happens when the things we feel are shared by tens or millions of other people.
He's found that shared emotions can have surprising effects on all of us.
I mean, in October 1938, millions of Americans were listening to the radio when the broadcast was interrupted by what seemed like a news bulletin.
Announcers described an alien spaceship landing on a farm in New Jersey.
Martian invaders soon emerged from the spaceship and started taking over the United States.
They warned the people to evacuate the city as the Martians approach.
Estimated in the last two hours, three million people have moved out along the roads to the north.
All communication with Jersey Shore closed ten minutes ago.
No more defenses. Our army is wiped out.
Artillery, air force, everything wiped out.
This may be the last broadcast.
So this was not an actual news bulletin, of course, but a fictional presentation called War of the Worlds created by the director Orson Welles.
Can you remind us of the effect that this broadcast had on listeners, Amit?
Yeah, so this created a widespread panic among listeners who basically thought that Martians took over the United States or the world.
And, you know, panic thrives when there's ambiguity.
No one has ever experienced a Martian attack and no one even can imagine what is the right thing to do when Martians attack.
Where do you go? There's no plane you can go or there's basically nothing to do.
And so panic really kind of thrives in these situations and this ambiguity just led to widespread panic.
Yeah. So one of the things that we saw in the aftermath of the Orson Welles broadcast, but also in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombings, in the aftermath of the stock market meltdown you saw in Israel, is that fear can spread very easily, almost like a highly infectious virus.
Can you explain the idea of emotional contagion, Amit?
Yeah, so generally speaking, emotion contagion involves the tendency of people to adopt the emotions of their social surroundings.
Now, this is caused by a variety of mechanisms.
We're wired to mimic our social environment.
So there's a basic mechanism of mimicry.
We use other people as information to evaluate our emotions.
And so we take people's emotions as information for what we should feel.
And there's also just natural activation of the brain, a category activation of panic when you see a panic around you.
Now, there's something really interesting about emotion contagion, which is that we have an evolutionary tendency to attend specifically to negative emotions.
So our ancestors were not able to doom scroll, so they didn't have an endless amount of negative emotional information.
They observed reality as it unfolded, and negative situations were extremely informative to them.
If there is an attack on one's village, or if there's something that one needs to be afraid of, this is extremely informative.
And so our general tendency to attend more to negativity leads to the fact that emotion contagion is usually much quicker and much stronger for negative emotions.
So in 2012, the social media giant Facebook ran an experiment in emotional contagion.
Many people were concerned about the ethics of this experiment.
But what did Facebook do, Amit?
So this is probably the most important paper that came during my PhD, and it really impacted me for a variety of reasons.
What Facebook did, and they did the experiment in 2012, is basically for a period of a week, they took people who usually wrote a lot of posts on Facebook.
And for half of them, they reduced the post that had negative emotions to almost minimum.
And for half of them, they reduced the post that expressed positive emotions to almost minimum.
And so some of the participants basically saw just negative emotions on their feeds, and some of the participants or the users saw basically just positive emotions on their feeds.
And then they looked what content do these participants or users produce.
And they saw that it had an effect on the content that users were producing.
So users who were exposed to more positive content tended to generate posts that were more positive.
And people who basically saw negative emotions on their feed mostly produced or produced more negative content by themselves.
You told me that years earlier when you attended that protest or that series of protests in Jerusalem, you were very angry before you went out to the protest.
But when you went there and you saw all these other people who were also angry, it made you even angrier.
What do we know about how group processes modulate individual emotion?
When we experience an emotion collectively, how does that change the emotion that we feel?
Yeah, so the notion that when people get together, they become more emotional is one of the foundations of social sciences.
So when I started to think about what makes groups emotional, one of the ideas I've had was that people may not be accurate in their evaluation of what other people feel.
And if we think that other people are feeling stronger emotions than they actually are, we may conform to that emotional values, which leads the whole system to be amplified.
Amit himself got to experience this crowd distortion effect some time ago.
He had to give a series of high stakes talks as he was searching for a job as a professor.
It was very stressful, but he felt he had gotten the hang of it by the time he got to the final talk.
That was until he looked out into the audience.
So when I was going into that talk, I thought to myself, Oh, this is going to be just a breeze.
You know, I've done this before and I feel very confident.
But the moment I started my talk, I realized that there was a person in the audience who was really not happy with what I had to say.
I mean, I don't know this for sure.
He may not have been happy because of something he had for breakfast.
Right. But I didn't care about that.
I thought that he was angry at me.
And I remember knowing that I should not be spending much of my time.
Look in him and it is distracting and maybe not representative what other people say.
But I just could not get my eyes off of it.
Yeah. And I didn't get the job.
And still, I didn't know if it was because of him or not because of him.
But I remember that experience very, very vividly.
One reason being in a crowd amplifies our emotions is that we preferentially pay attention to people in the crowd who are behaving emotionally.
Amit ran an experiment that revealed how common this behavior is.
We had people wear an eye tracker and we had them look at crowds with people expressing different emotional intensities.
And what we could see was that people had a hard time this attaching their attention from the more emotional faces.
It took them longer.
They had to scan the crowd, but it took them longer.
They spent longer time on those emotional faces.
And indeed, their evaluations of the overall emotions were more intense than the actual emotion expressed by the crowd.
You know, I'm thinking about those speeches that politicians give where they sometimes have their supporters sitting behind them as they're giving the speech.
So you can see the politician in the front and the supporters in the back.
And it's inevitable that you end up scanning the faces of all the people behind the politician.
And it's true. Our eyes do gravitate to the person who seems the most expressive, the person who seems to be experienced.
They're experiencing the most emotions.
Our eyes seem to be drawn to that person, almost like a gravitational feel.
Absolutely. And I would say even further, you know, much of the emotional content that we consume is collective in many ways.
So when we scroll through our social media feeds, for example, and we try to understand what people feel about something, we don't just get one expression.
We get multiple expressions, and then we need to aggregate these expressions and represent them in a sense.
And so one of my students, Jonas Shone, extended our work of crowds to feeds.
And so what we show there is that people remember stronger emotions on their feeds much more, and this paints their perception of what the collective feels in response to certain events.
So our representations of multiple emotions tend to be amplified, generally speaking.
So you and your colleagues call this idea a crophaly.
What is a crophaly, Amit?
Yeah, so a crophaly is a take -off on the term homophaly.
So homophaly is one of the most established phenomena in social sciences, and it's basically attraction to people who are similar to you.
Acro means extreme, and so a crophaly means attraction to people who are more extreme than you.
And the idea is that if you have two people who have the same distance from you, or the same distance from you in terms of their views or their emotions, one is more extreme and one is less extreme.
You would prefer to interact with a person who is more extreme than the person who is more moderate.
And you can imagine, if you play that out in your mind, if that attraction is even tiny, that leads the whole system to slowly polarize and become more and more emotional over time.
And so we had a series of studies that examined that idea.
What's interesting is that if you ask people, are you more attracted to people who are more extreme or less extreme, they often will say, no, no, I like moderates.
I prefer moderates because they represent something that I believe is better in some ways or I believe is more balanced.
But when you give them a choice, or when you have them to interact with someone who is less extreme or more extreme, and you ask them, how much did you like that person?
They tend to prefer the people who are more extreme.
And that tendency, that acrophily, has a huge impact over time on the rate and the degree of segregation and polarization that may occur within a network.
As we are drawn to notice individuals who show heightened emotion, we unconsciously assume this heightened state of emotion is shared by the group as a whole.
We ratchet up our own emotions to match our perception of the crowd.
Besides the idea of emotion contagion, Amita studied another aspect of collective emotion.
He calls these emotional cascades.
The best way to understand this is to start with an event that unfolded in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.
So the event started at 12 p .m.
where a police officer shot Mike Brown at his car.
An hour later, Michael Brown's father posted a picture of himself holding a cardboard that says, the Ferguson police just executed my unarmed son.
And you can already see tweets about Ferguson, 2 p .m., two hours after the incident.
And rates were increasing, reaching up to 30 ,000 tweets per hour by August 14th, five days later.
And I was a grad student at the time, and I was observing this as it unfolded, and I started to record all these tweets and kind of study them.
And what I could see there really changed my perception about what makes collective emotions stronger.
So one of the interesting things is that the emotions of individuals in the movement were calming down.
So if a person wrote a second tweet about Ferguson, it would be less intense than the first.
So people as individuals habituated to the story.
But the whole system as a whole, at some point, started to increase in intensity.
A great analogy for that is that of a forest fire.
So if you look at a forest fire, sometimes if you look at the specific trees, you know, the trees, they burn down and that's it.
They're burnt. But the fire may increase in intensity over time as it accumulates more and more territory.
And so if you want to think about the influence of forest fires, it's not enough to be thinking about the individual tree.
You have to be taking a broader view and thinking of the collective phenomena here and how you take control of that.
And so that's one insight of because emotions spread, they become more intense.
A related idea is that collective emotions change what gets shared and expressed.
So we've talked about the idea that more extreme emotions in some ways attract attention.
But can you see a moment about the valence of that emotion?
What happens when the emotion being expressed as positive versus negative?
So one of the most basic findings in emotion research is what we call negativity bias, which is people's tendency to attend more to negative emotions compared to positive emotions.
And so one of the findings that we're starting to see when you look at what content people share on social media is that people generally tend to share more negative emotions compared to positive emotions.
And this is, interestingly, especially true when these emotions are produced by people who are public figures.
So for example, basically, public figures and ordinary users, 20 % of the tweets that they produce, for example, are negative.
But if you look at shared content, content that's shared by public figures, 30 % of it is negative.
So there is a 10 % increase of negativity shared by public figures.
And that has a huge effect on the content that people consume on social media.
So when you step back and look at this big picture, Amit, groups can amplify our emotions, they draw us to people with extreme views, and they especially draw us to negative emotions rather than positive emotions?
That's right. So generally speaking, people tend to attend to emotions in general, and they tend to attend more to negative emotions.
The fact that people tend to these negative emotions means that they're more likely to share them, which means that their proportion in the content that people see increases.
We also tend to amplify emotions by aggregating that emotional information.
So in addition to this basic contagion effect, the fact that we over -represent in our attention and memory stronger emotional expressions, meaning that we tend to think that people's emotions are even stronger than they actually are.
But even further, the fact that we prefer people who express more extreme emotions mean that our social networks to begin with are more emotional.
And so we have this cyclical loop of contagion, misperception, high selection that contributes to that process of increased emotionality.
And as we become sucked into that process, we essentially make the group itself larger, which in turn has the effect of sucking in even more people.
That's right. That's exactly right.
I'm wondering, Amit, if you've given thought to why our brains harness our individual emotions to the currents that run through groups.
Your data suggests that this does happen.
I think we've all seen this firsthand.
But why do you think it happens?
Well, I would actually flip the order of importance here.
I think that first and foremost we're members of a collective system, and only after we're individuals.
I think that as psychologists, we're kind of trying to think of people as individual entities.
But really, everything that we know of individual brains is that we need social connections just like we need water or air.
And our emotional experiences are not independent.
They're mostly collective, and they're also experienced at the individual level.
And so we have very few emotions that we feel as separate individuals.
Many more emotions that we feel as part of family members, community members, national groups, and collectives, sports fans, fan clubs, and so on and so forth.
And so I would urge people who think about emotions to think of emotions and emotion regulation much more in the collective than the individual level.
Share emotions are neither good nor bad, but they can lead us to do things that are good for us or things that are bad for us.
When we come back, how to step away from groups when they are leading us astray, and how to open the door to shared emotions we might never experience otherwise?
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Our emotions are designed to guide our behavior.
When we are afraid, we feel like running or hiding.
Sadness tells us that something is wrong and to avoid doing things in the future that put us in the same position.
Joy and delight and awe prompt us to do more of the things that bring us joy and delight and awe.
As a deeply social species, it is unsurprising that we are also influenced powerfully, not just by our own emotions, but the emotions coursing through the people around us.
It makes sense that fear in others should spread contagiously to us that we get swept up in collective feelings of anger, envy, and triumph.
Amit Goldenberg is a psychologist at Harvard Business School.
He is fascinated by the effect of group -level emotions.
Amit, when your son was small, he once fell off his high chair.
What caused this to happen, what happened, and what did it teach you about the ways in which we think about shared emotions?
Well, first of all, I'm afraid it was failure in parenting that caused that to happen.
We had a new high chair that we've never used.
And when my wife Jenna put our son, Levie, who was just a baby, to eat, a few moments later, he kind of leaned forward and fell off the high chair and landed on his face.
And that was a huge moment of panic, obviously.
Everybody was panicking.
Levie was panicking because he was just hit in the face.
Jenna was panicking and feeling a lot of guilt because she forgot to buckle the seat in the proper way.
And I was also panicking because this is one of those moments where you say, oh my God, this is exactly what you're afraid of as a parent.
I was standing at the side and I saw Levie panicking and Jenna's panicking.
And I was also internally panicking, but I felt that the appropriate response was to not express my panic and to, in some ways, offset the panic that Jenna felt to maybe help Levie calm down and realize that we have things under control.
And I think that parents do this all the time.
You know, we see what our partner is expressing and we ask, is this the appropriate response?
Sometimes we overreact.
Sometimes we underreact.
And if we're good partners, we offset our partner's responses.
So I see each member of a collective as trying to steer the group in the appropriate way by modifying their own emotions.
And so the best way to see it is in family units, which are small, and each person has a huge impact on the unit.
And so in this unit, parents and people are expressing their emotions to try to get the group to feel in the appropriate way.
So you've done research that looks at how when two people are in a relationship, they often cue off each other such that the emotional unit now stays in balance.
Tell me a little bit about this work on what you call emotional compensation.
Yeah. So what we do in these experiments is we give parents a scenario.
So, for example, you have two boys and a girl, Mark, David, and Jenny.
Twelve -year -old Jenny is the oldest.
Last week, your partner smelled alcohol on Jenny's breath when she came home.
Your partner was very surprised and asked Jenny, were you drinking alcohol?
Jenny immediately replies, yes, I drink with my friends.
So what? Already as a parent, you're starting to get angry.
Yesterday, your friend called and told you that she ran into Jenny on the street and Jenny seemed quite drunk.
You and your partner sit to talk with Jenny.
And so in this scenario, the parents hear the other parents saying, this is a huge deal, your partner says to Jenny, extremely angry.
I know kids are a drinking alcohol this age.
Drinking destroyed their lives for good and it will destroy your life too.
So it turns out that when they hear their partner being overly angry, they actually lower down the anger to try to create some balanced response.
And what we find, and that's the most interesting thing, is that parents who tend to compensate for their partner over or under reactions generally tend to report happier marriage.
Which is not what you would expect this thing.
You would expect that parents who are congruent in their responses are happier.
But in fact, a collective systems need balance.
And if a system has the tools to balance itself, that is a predictor of a more successful unit.
What is a collective system?
Amit says skilled leaders can help regulate the collective emotions of entire nations.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Americans suffering through the Great Depression that they had nothing to fear but fear itself, he was trying to calm the panic that was engulfing many households.
Corporate leaders, such as Steve Ballmer at Microsoft, have shown how you can modulate emotion in the other direction.
In this speech, for example, to rev up software developers.
It instills a lot of passion.
When we think about leaders and emotion regulation, we often think about how can leaders reduce negative emotions.
But really, leaders play a really important role in increasing positive emotions within their groups and organizations.
It starts with joy, happiness, and in this case, it's passion.
Ballmer's passion is so strong that it's contagious.
He doesn't need to fake it.
It comes naturally to him.
He sweats during this speech.
And it's just a great gift that someone has as a leader.
Rituals are also a way people can regulate collective emotions.
Amit says you see rituals in religious settings, at cultural events, and on sports fields.
So there's all sorts of ceremonies, start from physical touch.
So a player is standing on the penalty line and they're fist bumping everyone in their team.
Why is that? I mean, why do high -intensity law firms get together and drink on Friday afternoons?
They do this as a ritual to help resolve the anxiety that was building up during the week and get these people ready to spend some time with their family when they're not amped up from a really busy week of work.
Or if you think about morning rituals, for example, probably the same idea.
Absolutely. We talked about the fact that feeling negative emotions together feels better.
But it also helped us to understand that people are feeling negative emotions with us as a form both to amplify these negative emotions in a concise way, but also to control them.
Rituals control variability, and we use rituals to have a specific emotional experience in a controlled way.
Another way of nudging a group's emotions in a particular direction involves teaching people that their opponents are capable of change.
Amit, you've tested an intervention like this with a group of both Jewish and Palestinian students.
Can you describe the intervention and tell me what happened?
Yeah, we're in the era of hatred.
And hatred should be very clearly differentiated from anger.
When you feel angry, you want to make things right, and you want to fix things.
When you feel hatred, the person on the other side, you already established the idea that the person on the other side cannot be changed.
And there's nothing that can be done.
But you can't tell Israelis, Palestinians can change because, and you can't tell Palestinians that Israelis can change because they've been educated all their life that the other side hates them.
And so you have to do it in an indirect way.
So we developed these leadership workshops where we talked about identifying change in general as a leader and thinking about groups as malleable entities.
This is based on Carol Duweck's idea of malleability.
And we show that even when you teach people about group malleability, even when you don't tell them that they need to apply this to the specific context of the conflict, the idea of malleability seeps into a lot of their aspects of their thinking.
And changes how they feel and how they think about resolving the conflict.
Amit Goldenberg is a psychologist at Harvard Business School.
Amit, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Thank you. 0 There are situations where we all get to see collective emotions in action.
It doesn't matter if you live in a bustling city or a tiny village.
It makes no difference if you're a member of a vast intergenerational household or living on your own.
You might be religious or you might be a devout atheist.
Humans around the world invoke supernatural forces when it looks like their sports teams might lose.
They take part in annual festivals that demand time, effort and money.
They mark important moments such as marriages, births and deaths with intricately choreographed scripts.
These festivals, rites and scripts are largely designed to shape the emotions we feel collectively.
The psychology of rituals perfectly complements the story we heard today from Amit Goldenberg.
Some time ago, I interviewed the anthropologist, Dimitri Zigalathas.
He told me not only about his research, but about the time he himself was induced to take part in one of the most fearsome rituals in the world.
He was terrified, yes.
But he said, What I also felt was this jolt of exhilaration that lasted not just for a few minutes, not just for a few hours, but in fact for several days.
When we come back, a bonus Emotions 2 .0 feature into the deep history and powerful psychology of rituals.
Anthropologist Dimitri Zigalathas works at the University of Connecticut.
His research has taken him across the planet.
In his travels, Dimitri has found common cultural practices among people living in far -flung places.
Many of these practices involve dangerous, difficult or expensive rituals.
The rituals themselves are often dramatic.
They are also regularly incomprehensible to outsiders.
But when you peer beneath the surface, rituals actually reveal a great deal about the human mind and the psychological features that people around the world have in common.
Dimitri Zigalathas, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hi, Sankar, thank you for inviting me.
Dimitri, some years ago, you found yourself in the Spanish village of San Pedro, Manrique.
And you met a man named Alejandro.
How did you first come into contact with him?
So I was doing research on fire -walking rituals in Greece.
That was for my doctoral research.
And after that, I found out that there's another place in Europe where fire -walking rituals are performed.
And this is the small village called San Pedro, Manrique.
So I just showed up there.
I started asking people if they knew about this ritual.
And as it turns out, it was a really big deal in that community.
So one of the first people who others pointed me to was Alejandro.
People hold him in very high esteem in that village because he's one of the oldest fire -walkers.
And he, in fact, has been doing this ritual for many decades.
So I understand that he was in his 70s when you were talking with him.
Can you paint me a detailed picture of the fire -walking ritual as it was practiced in this small Spanish village?
We are talking about a village of 600 inhabitants.
That is in the middle of pretty much nowhere.
And yet, people have built this large open amphitheater that can host 3 ,000 spectators.
And they only use it once a year for the purposes of this ritual.
So clearly, this is very important to them.
On the summer solstice, every June, people start gathering in the central square.
They engage in all kinds of processions and other celebrations throughout the day.
And in the evening, they all join hands, and they form this human chain.
And they start marching up the hill in lockstep towards that venue.
And once everybody takes their place, at exactly midnight, people start taking off their shoes, and they face a large pit of coals.
This has been produced by two tons of ochlea that has been burning for hours.
And it forms this bed of glowing coals.
We actually measured the temperatures there at 1 ,200 Fahrenheit.
That's enough to melt aluminum.
And while faced with this bed of coals, they take somebody on their back, and they walk barefoot across it, on the burning fire.
Wow, and this was true of Alejandro as well.
He would carry someone across this bed of fire?
Correct. In fact, one time I saw him carry his niece, who was significantly larger than him.
Alejandro is a tiny man.
So he struggled to balance her on his soldiers.
People offered to help him.
But then he just waved his hand and he went through and did it.
You once asked Alejandro if he would ever stop engaging in this ritual.
I want to play you a clip of what he said in Spanish.
Can you translate what he told you, Dimitri's?
He looked at me, he thought about it for a while, and he says, well, I suppose that they will come.
But when it does, he says, I will just not go up there.
And I said, what do you mean?
He said, well, I cannot go there because if I do that, if I saw it without being able to do it, I would climb on the bell tower and jump off and kill myself.
So the following year Alejandro got some news from his doctor.
What was it, Dimitri's?
I heard from Alejandro's son, Mamel, that his doctor told him he had detected some arrhythmia in his heart, and therefore he banned him from doing the ritual.
But things took a dramatic turn that night.
I was in the central square with his son, preparing for the procession that would lead us to the venue.
And at some point Mamel pulled me out of the chain.
I said, what's happening?
Mamel says, come with me and you will see.
So he took me to his father's house, and he announced, he said, dad, I know you cannot do the ritual, so I'm going to carry you through the fire.
And Alejandro just looked at him for a few seconds.
He hugged him, and then they cried together.
So we left the house, and we walked towards the venue.
And indeed, Mamel was one of the first persons to walk across the fire.
He took off his shoes, he took his father on his back, and he crossed the burning coals.
At that point, the crowd was extended.
Everybody was cheering.
His family rushed to hike him.
But then suddenly Alejandro turned towards them, and with a sharp gesture, he told them to stop.
Everybody went completely silent, 3 ,000 people.
You could hear a pin drop as Alejandro turned around facing the fire, and he just went ahead and crossed it again by himself.
Thank you.
