Viraj's Weblog

Just finished the excellent book How Pleasure Works. Here are some interesting quotes.

What kind of pictures would you expect monkeys to like looking at? One is very obvious, the other is not:

In a recent study, male rhesus monkeys were put into an experimental setup where they could choose, by moving their heads, to either receive some sweet fruit juice or to get to look at a picture. There were two sorts of pictures that monkeys would give up the juice for - female hindquarters and the faces of high-status male monkeys. Two major vices - pornography and celebrity worship - are not exclusively human.

Another interesting topic is how we tend to treat pictures as the real thing.

My colleagues and I recently did a series of studies in which we took pictures of people's precious objects - their wedding rings, say - and asked them to cut the pictures up. They were willing to do so, but measures of skin conductance showed that they were in a state of mild anxiety, as if they were destroying the precious things themselves. And if you ask people to throw darts at pictures of babies, they tend to miss.

Then there is the idea of why we like to watch horror films, or gawk at anything where someone is in a bad predicament. It's the same reason why we play-fight:

We are drawn, then, toward worst-case scenarios. The details of the scenarios are often irrelevant. It's not that we enjoy zombie films because we need to prepare for the zombie uprising. We don't have to plan for what to do if we accidentally kill our fathers, or marry our mothers. But even these exotic cases serve as useful practice for bad times, exercising our psyches for when life goes to hell. From this perspective, it's not the zombies that make zombie films so compelling, it is that the theme of the zombies is a clever way to frame stories about being attacked by strangers and betrayed by those we love. This is what attracts us; the brain eating is an optional extra.

And what about chili peppers or other foods no other animal would eat?

.. it is hard to see why we would need to practice eating spicy foods or taking hot baths. These Rozin cases might have a more utilitarian explanation, something along the line of the awful old joke about the guy who was banging his head against the wall; when asked why he was doing it, he said, "It feels so good when I stop." For some of Rozin's examples, the initial pain might be worthwhile because it is outweighed by the later pleasure. We might grow to like the pain of stepping into a hot bath, because it is always followed by the bliss of when the temperature becomes just right.