Zombies!
It’s been forty years now, but I still remember that dark and rainy October night, because it was one of the scariest of my life. I was in college and I was walking home at about 10 p.m. from an auditorium on one side of campus to my apartment clear on the other side. I passed many people on the sidewalks going in the opposite direction—except that they were not people. They were zombies. Groups of them, zombie after zombie staggering toward me, wanting to devour my flesh and slurp my brain! I did everything I could to avoid them, taking side streets and sticking to the shadows, but no, they were still there, coming right at me! I finally made it home safely, sweating and shaking.
This was way before zombies became trendy and there were things like Zombie Night, as was the case at a 2016 Miami Marlins baseball game. (“Help us vote for the best-dressed Zombie!” the team tweeted during the game.) No, this was back in the mid-1970s, only a few years after George Romero’s horrifying cult classic, Night of the Living Dead, was released, and I had just attended a screening in one of the big campus auditoriums. All the way home I was convinced that at least some of these normal-looking people all around me were actually zombies, like in the movie, and I was on high, paranoid alert.
What had happened to me? While my body had left the theater and was walking home, my mind was still in that theater, still immersed in the plot and logic and visceral horror of Night of the Living Dead. Clearly, something had taken place in my unconscious to fill me with a fear that I knew was irrational and childish, even as it set off the adrenaline alarms in my body.
In daily life, as we move from one context and experience to the next, our senses immediately move on and take in the information in the new situation, the new present. Yet our mind takes some time to shake off the effects of the previous moment. Our mind lingers in the recent past and only gradually moves on into the new situation. This means that the residue of the recent past can influence how one interprets a new situation, how one behaves in it, the choices one makes, and the emotions one feels. I don’t really believe in zombies, but that one night, I did.
Back then in college, as I’ve said, I was an FM radio disc jockey on the student station. This was the era of “progressive rock,” and FM radio was relatively new. Unlike commercial AM stations, we could play longer cuts of music—more music, fewer interruptions. As I mentioned in the Introduction, one of the arts of FM rock radio at this time was segueing from from one song or instrumental piece into the next, as seamlessly as possible, much as club and dance party DJs do today. I’d overlay the long, drawn-out ending of Robin Trower’s “Bridge of Sighs” with the long, drawn-out opening of Savoy Brown’s “Hellbound Train” (bonus points if you’ve heard of either one of them), “cross-fading” the one into the other. The first song lingered and carried on into the next.
Our minds, too, are constantly segueing from one situation to the next. This is crucial to understand: what is active and influential in the mind at any given moment is more than what is going on right now in the present. The vestiges of recent experience only gradually dissipate with time. What we think is affecting us in the new situation is what is right in front of us, available to our conscious awareness through our senses. But there is much more going on behind the scenes than we realize.
That’s what this chapter is about: the carryover effect of one experience into the next—the very, very recent past—and how it can bleed into the occurring present.
Two consecutive experiences are often quite distinct from, and unrelated to, each other. Your mother calls you at work and just after you get off the phone your boss comes in to give you some pressing new assignment. Or someone holds the door for you as you enter the fast-food restaurant and then you head back out into heavy holiday traffic. There’s no rational or logical reason why the phone call with your mother should affect how you act toward your boss, or why someone being courteous to you on the way into McDonald’s should affect how you drive on Interstate 95. But they do. These thoughts, feelings, desires, goals, hopes, and motivations from Situation 1 do not vanish in a nanosecond as we exit stage right into Situation 2, as if there were some kind of on-off switch. Instead, they leave a residue that affects our subsequent experience in subtle yet powerful ways.
Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, but that same year also saw the release of a quite different movie—one that, in an odd way, would turn out to influence psychological science and lead to the discovery that “life lingers.” In fact, you can still watch the trailer of this movie on YouTube today.
“Now you’ll know the thrill of wrapping your legs around a tornado of pounding pistons!” a rakish male voice growls over images of a leather-clad woman riding a snarling motorcycle, before cutting to a man pulling at the zipper of her outfit with his teeth. “She goes as far as she wants, as fast as she wants, straddling the potency of one hundred wild horses!”
So goes the trailer for the 1968 British-French film Girl on a Motorcycle, also known as Naked Under Leather, directed by Jack Cardiff. It starred the blond-haired it-girl Marianne Faithfull, whom a writer later described as follows: “Quite simply, there was no female anywhere on the planet as cool and as sexy as she was during the 1960s. She was born with one of the most classically beautiful faces of all time and she just had that look which embodied the era as no other woman could.” In the film, Faithfull played Rebecca, a recent newlywed who skips out on her hubby—with whom she envisions a stultifying future marriage—and rides off on her motorcycle to meet her lover (played by the classically handsome Alain Delon) and embark on a series of erotic, hallucinatory adventures (which involve leather, nakedness, and, of course, pounding pistons). The film was a hit in Britain and garnered the scandalous X rating of that era.
Midway into the next decade, in 1975, the psychologists Dolf Zillmann, Jennings Bryant, and Joanne Cantor used Girl on a Motorcycle in a classic experiment to demonstrate how physical activity can affect conscious, rational thoughts. All the participants in the study watched the film, but only after engaging in a workout—riding a bike of their own, in fact, albeit just an exercise bike with few if any pounding pistons. The key to the experiment was that each subject took in Marianne Faithfull’s performance while in one of the three different stages of physiological arousal that follow exercising. In the first phase, right after the physical activity is over, we know that our high levels of arousal—heart pumping, maybe shortness of breath—are because of having exercised. In the second and key phase, we believe we have calmed down and are back to our normal arousal state, yet we are actually still physiologically aroused. Our arousal state lingers on for a while even after we feel that it is over and done with. In the third and final phase, arousal has actually returned to normal levels and we correctly believe that we are no longer physiologically aroused.
The question Zillmann and his colleagues asked was how the participant’s state of arousal following the workout would affect how sexually aroused he became by watching the segment of Girl on a Motorcycle. The subjects in the first phase of the heightened physiological state resulting from the exercise, who were still fully aware of the exercise’s effect on them, didn’t report any greater level of sexual arousal from the movie than did a non-exercising control group. And participants in the third phase, who were no longer actually aroused from the exercise, also were not that sexually aroused by the movie. In fact, both the first and the third group reported fairly negative impressions of the film. Importantly, those were the groups that had an accurate read on their arousal levels. But then there was the second group. That is where things got interesting.
These participants did sense that they were physiologically aroused while watching the movie; even though this was really caused by the lingering effects of their exercising, they thought the effect of the exercise was over with, so they mistakenly attributed their arousal solely to Marianne Faithfull and her leather-bound adventures. They also reported liking Girl on a Motorcycle significantly more than did the other two groups. The lingering effect of the exercise was no longer in their conscious experience even though it was still in their bodies, so they attached their unconscious feelings instead to what they were aware of at the moment—the movie.
Cantor, Zillmann, and Bryant’s experiment established the important concept of excitation transfer. They showed that physiological arousal caused by one experience (a workout, but also, for example, a frightening or violent encounter) could be misunderstood as the result of a subsequent experience. There is a time window, then, after an arousing experience, when we are prone to misunderstand the real reasons for our arousal, believing it is being caused by what happens to be going on right then in the present and not a lingering, carryover effect of the recent past.
In another famous demonstration of the same effect, men who had just crossed a rickety pedestrian bridge over a deep gorge were found to be more attracted to a woman they met while crossing that bridge. How do we know this? Because they were more likely to call that woman later on (she was one of the experimenters for the study and had given these men her number after they filled out a survey for her) than were those who met the same woman while crossing a much safer bridge. The men in this study reported that their decision to call the woman had nothing to do with their experience of crossing the scary bridge. But the experiment clearly showed they were wrong about that, because those in the scary-bridge group were more likely to call the woman than were those who had just crossed the safe bridge. You may remember Keanu Reeves’s line to Sandra Bullock at the end of Speed as they’re about to kiss after a long, traumatic day together.
“I have to warn you,” his character says, “I’ve heard relationships based on intense experiences never work.”
“Okay,” Bullock’s character says. “We’ll have to base it on sex then.”
So, hmmm, why do you suppose teenagers like scary horror movies so much? Because physiological arousal from watching, say, ax-wielding maniacs or malevolent spirits transfers into—and is misunderstood as caused by—sexual feelings and attraction to the person they’re seeing the movie with (especially after leaving the theater). Maybe that’s why back in the day, my own pack of teenage friends liked to tell each other ghost stories around a fire on the Lake Michigan beach well into the night.
Lingering arousal can be misinterpreted in ways other than as sexual feelings and attraction. Another experiment by Zillmann and his colleagues in 1974 focused on anger and aggression. Would the arousing effects of exercise, they wondered, cause people to think that they were angrier at another person? Strong emotions do have an active physical arousal component to them, and one very influential early theory of emotion held that often we feel the arousal and only then interpret what emotion we are feeling based on the context. When Roger Federer breaks down in tears after winning Wimbledon, we understand that he is crying tears of joy, not feeling abject sorrow; the same racking sobs and tears at a funeral we understand are not tears of joy (we hope) but the expression of a very different emotion.
Once again, the male participants in the study rode an exercise bike for ninety seconds. Then, either immediately after or following a delay, they took on the role of “teacher” in a re-creation of the notorious Milgram study on obedience. Their job was to deliver shocks to a “learner” after every wrong answer, believing they were subjects in a study of how punishment affects learning. But first, in an interesting twist to the original Milgram procedure, the “learner” was given the opportunity to shock the “teacher.” The learner got to ask the teacher his opinion on twelve controversial issues of the day, and the learner could give him a shock for every one he disagreed with. It was prearranged that the teacher would get nine shocks out of the twelve opinions, so you can imagine that after getting shocked nine times the teacher participant was now pretty ticked off at the learner. Uh-oh, now it was the teacher’s turn to shock the learner for every wrong answer. The teacher was given the leeway to vary the intensity of the shock from 1 (mild) to 10 (rather painful)—“whatever he felt was most appropriate.”
Just as in their erotic film study, the researchers found that if the teacher gave the shocks right after exercising, there was no effect of the exercise on the intensity of the shocks given, compared to a group that did not exercise. But if the shocks were given after a few minutes’ delay after exercising, now the teacher was angrier than usual at the learner and gave him more intense shocks for each error. The arousal from the exercise was still there after the delay but the teacher participant misunderstood it as being anger at the learner for giving him nine shocks, and so gave the learner more intense shocks as a result. Once again, the participants didn’t feel that the exercise bike had anything to do with how strongly they shocked the learner. They were unaware of the lingering effects of exercise on how angry they had become afterward.
These misattribution effects are made possible by lingering influences of recent experiences that are still affecting us on an unconscious level. This isn’t the long-ago evolutionary past of our species, nor the forgotten past of our infancy and early childhood, nor our past of collective biases absorbed from growing up in a given culture. It is what we experienced five hours ago, five minutes ago, five seconds ago. We remember it, yes, if asked to do so, but we don’t appreciate how it might still be affecting us at a later point in time. Like the men who watched Girl on a Motorcycle or were crossing the rickety old bridge, we might be sexually excited for reasons other than the ones we are aware of; like the men who gave stronger electric shocks in the “learning experiment,” we might be attributing how angry we feel to the present moment. Such conscious confusions and misunderstandings are happening to us all the time.
One very common situation in which we feel anger is on the highway. We feel road rage at the selfish, reckless behavior of the other drivers. And in the course of all the driving I’ve done in my life, I’ve noticed how this irritation at others’ bad driving adds up, that I become more angry at the fifth and sixth person who cuts me off, or is going 25 miles an hour on a twisting, two-lane country road, than I am at the first or second person who does that. Now, why would I be any more upset with the fifth or sixth person than the first or second? Each of them did the “bad thing” only one time. But I react to the later offenders as if each is the same person annoying me over and over again. Naturally you would be angrier at the same person the fifth or sixth time she cut you off than you would be the first few times. Except, of course, many different people have annoyed you only once; intellectually, you know this very well. But each time, the anger inside builds up, more and more, so it might as well be the same person, according to the way you feel inside. Actually, William James understood this principle long before there were any cars and highways at all. He called it the “summation of stimuli,” describing how the first few occurrences of annoyance aren’t enough to provoke the response, but they lead to a “heightened irritability,” and eventually another such (small by itself) annoyance is enough to “break the camel’s back.” Leading, as we all know, illogical and irrational as it may be, to our greater anger at the later culprits.
Sexual arousal and anger are powerful emotional experiences. But it doesn’t take that level of intensity for an experience to linger on and influence us without our knowledge. Even milder emotional states, the ones we call moods, can carry over from the events that caused them to affect us where and when we might least expect.
“Weather is a purely personal matter,” wrote the Colombian poet Álvaro Mutis. In my case he was certainly right. Central Illinois, where I grew up, does not boast an enviable climate. In the winter, lucky us, we were far enough north to feel the arctic winds swooping out of Canada (the “Alberta Clipper”), and in the summer, we were far enough south to experience the hot, humid air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. I was ten years old before we got our first air conditioner, so on the many 100-plus-degree days in the summertime we (and the rest of the town) would just live in one of the public swimming pools. As you can imagine, this climate shaped my day-to-day life back then.
The current weather is an ever-present prime in our lives, an ongoing, background moderator of our emotional state. We all know this from experience, from noticing how we often feel on a glorious, sunny day versus on a drippy, gray day. But weather can influence our moods even when our attention is not called to it, and these moods can affect our behavior in ways we well know they shouldn’t, and would try to prevent if we realized what was going on. Social psychologists Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore uncovered this complex interaction between mind and weather when they conducted a much-cited study in none other than my hometown of Champaign.
In the late spring of 1983, a female experimenter telephoned participants either on warm and sunny days, or on rainy days. She was calling from town, from the University of Illinois campus, and she was calling local numbers randomly taken from the student phone directory. This was back in the day before caller ID or smartphones that gave information about the caller’s actual location, which made it possible for the experimenter to say she was calling from the Chicago campus of the university, about 150 miles north. By telling the participants she was that far away, she could casually ask, early in the conversation, “By the way, how’s the weather down there?” (She knew, of course, what the weather was like, because she was right there herself.) But she only asked half the participants about the weather, calling their attention to it, and did not ask the other half. Next, all respondents were asked four questions about how satisfied they were with their entire lives to that point. The final question of the four had to do with how happy they felt at that moment.
Let’s take first the students whose attention was called to the day’s weather, by the experimenter’s casual “how’s the weather down there?” question at the start of the phone call. These students were in the same position as the exercise bike riders right after getting off the bike in the Zillmann arousal studies. They saw the sunny or rainy day outside and knew how it could be affecting their mood. For these student participants, then, the weather and the mood it inspired had no effect on their ratings of how well their entire lives had gone. If they felt in a happy or sad mood because of the weather, they were conscious of it, and so didn’t misunderstand those feelings as being responses to the questions they were being asked by the experimenter over the phone. The carryover was neutralized.
But the students whose attention was not called to the day’s weather closely resembled the participants who, a decade earlier, rode the exercise bike and, after a short delay, watched Girl on a Motorcycle. If it happened to be a sunny day outside, those students reported themselves as more satisfied with their entire lives to that point, compared to students who were called on a rainy day. They were asked the question, they consulted their inner feelings, and they took those feelings to be in response to the question that was asked—about their present situation—unaware that those feelings also came from the day’s weather. That they did come from the weather was shown by answers on the final question, because as one might expect, students who were called on sunny days felt happier at that moment than those called on rainy days. We all know that whether it happens to be sunny or rainy outside right now should have no influence on whether we feel our entire life to that point has gone well or not. Yet it did—the effect of the weather carried over, lingered on to create an unconscious influence on the students.
Well, you might be thinking, those Illinois students were just answering some survey questions over the phone. Their answers were not all that important to them. When our decisions are more important, we will be more careful and won’t be influenced by these extraneous and silly moods. Fair enough, but let’s see about that. What about financial decisions to buy or sell stocks, decisions regarding which millions upon millions of dollars are at stake as fortunes are made and lost every second?
In 2003, University of Michigan behavioral economists David Hirshleifer and Tyler Shumway published a comprehensive study of how the day’s weather affects the performance of the stock market in a particular city. Included in their analysis were weather and stock price data from twenty-six major stock markets around the world, over a period of fifteen years. They assessed the relation between morning sunshine in the city where a country’s major stock exchange was located and the behavior of that stock market that day.
They first removed seasonal stock return effects on stock prices. For example, perhaps stocks just do better in the summer months (which happen to have more sunny days) than in the winter months (which happen to have more cloudy days) because of factors unrelated to the weather, such as the annual economic cycle. Yet the researchers still found that morning sunshine experienced by the stock traders on their way into the stock market or into the offices of their financial institutions was strongly and significantly associated with increases in stock prices that day, and cloudy weather that morning associated with poor stock returns that day—across the twenty-six stock exchanges and holding over the fifteen years. “Our results are difficult to reconcile with fully rational price-setting,” they wrote. “There is no appealing rational explanation for why morning sunshine near a country’s stock exchange should be associated with high market index returns. This evidence is, however, consistent with sunlight affecting mood, and mood affecting prices.”
In other words, stock markets do better when it’s sunny, even though there’s no valid economic reason this should be so. The moods of the thousands upon thousands of human beings around the world in charge of buying and selling millions upon millions of dollars of stocks each day are as unconsciously vulnerable to weather as the moods of those Illinois college students. Weather can also affect public opinions and hence public policy about important social and environmental issues—such as about the weather itself. In a 2014 study published in the international science journal Nature, Columbia University decision scientist Elke Weber and her colleagues looked at how much a given day’s weather—warm or cold—affected the public’s concern over the global warming problem. To put this in perspective, global warming is perhaps the most important challenge humanity faces in preserving our species and keeping our planet habitable. Things have gotten so bad that the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking now says the human race has about one thousand years to find a new planet to live on. Yet climate change is also one of the most controversial issues that currently faces policy makers and everyday people like you and me, since some still deny it even exists, even today as coastal Georgia towns and entire Pacific islands are flooding because of rising ocean levels caused by the melting polar ice caps. What is fascinating (and sadly ironic) is how opinions regarding this issue fluctuate as a function of the very climate we’re arguing about.
In general, what Weber and colleagues found was that when the current weather is hot, public opinion holds that global warming is occurring, and when the current weather is cold, public opinion is less concerned about global warming as a general threat. It is as if we use “local warming” as a proxy for “global warming.” Again, this shows how prone we are to believe that what we are experiencing right now in the present is how things always are, and always will be in the future. Our focus on the present dominates our judgments and reasoning, and we are unaware of the effects of our long-term and short-term past on what we are currently feeling and thinking.
We’ve already seen how “local warming”—physical warmth and cold experiences—affects our feelings of trust and cooperation versus distrust and antagonism. These two types of “temperature,” physical and social, are so intertwined in us that their corresponding brain regions become wired together, as long as we were able to trust our parents to be there for us when we were infants and toddlers.
What that mental association creates, though, is another pathway through which our recent experiences can carry over and affect us in the present, before we know it. Our physical warm and cold experiences can cause us to feel socially warm or cold, and our social warm and cold experiences can cause us to feel physically warm or cold. And we are completely unaware of the effect of one type of warmth/coldness on the other.
For example, we can all remember times when a group of our friends left us out of something they were doing, and the much better times when we were invited to join them instead. To study the effects of social rejection or inclusion in the laboratory, psychologist Kip Williams developed a computer simulation called Cyberball. In the game, three stick figures on the screen toss a ball to each other, and each participant is represented by one of the stick figures. About midway through, in the rejection condition, the two other players stop throwing you the ball, and just throw it to each other over and over from that point on. (In the inclusion condition, they keep throwing to you as much as they did before.) Although this is just an insignificant computer game, and you don’t even know the other two players, you still feel a pang of sadness and unhappiness at being excluded. Being included is social warmth, and being excluded is social coldness.
Then comes the key measure: after the experiment, all participants were asked, along with other innocuous questions about the experimental room, to estimate the room temperature. The socially cold, excluded participants judged the room temperature as being lower (colder) than did the socially warm, “included” participants. The experience of social coldness had activated the associated feeling of physical coldness. The excluded participants assumed the room was colder, but it was actually the same temperature for all the participants.
Were their bodies actually colder, or did they just rate the room as colder (because, for example, the idea of coldness was primed in their minds)? To find out, Hans IJzerman and his colleagues conducted a further study in which they measured the participants’ actual body temperature after playing Cyberball, using a very sensitive thermometer used for industrial coolers, accurate to within three-hundredths of a degree Celsius, attached to the participant’s fingertip. And the study showed that being rejected in the Cyberball computer game (experiencing social coldness) did actually cause participants’ skin temperature to drop, an average of .38 degrees Celsius, or .68 Fahrenheit. (This seemingly small change is actually a significant fluctuation for the body.) So no wonder the previous study’s participants judged the room temperature to be colder—they were literally colder themselves, after experiencing social coldness.
A team of neuroscientists led by Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California, Los Angeles, replicated IJzerman’s findings at a major Los Angeles hospital, with nurses taking the body temperature of participants every hour over a six-hour period using an oral thermometer. The controlled hospital setting enabled other influences on oral temperature readings, such as food, drink, and exercise, as well as the room temperature, to be held constant for everyone in the study. Along with having their temperature taken, the participants rated, every hour, how socially connected they felt at that moment to their friends and family, how much they agreed with statements such as I feel like being around other people, I feel outgoing and friendly, I feel connected to others. Once again, the higher the body temperature reading (within normal range), the higher the rating of social connectedness—the body warmth and social warmth measures went up and down together. Remarkably, how close and connected you feel to your family and friends affects your body’s temperature—and vice versa.
What this means is that, at least to some extent, physical warmth might be able to substitute for social warmth missing in one’s life. Recall the poor little monkeys in Harlow’s studies. The ones who had access to the warm cloth mother, even though they were reared in isolation, could still socially function passably well as adults, compared to the pathetic little monkeys with no physical warmth to cling to. Because the physically warm experience is connected to feelings of social warmth in the brain, the physical warmth experience substituted to an extent for the missing mother in the infant monkeys’ lives. What about times then when we are feeling socially cold, because of rejection or loneliness? Would we then seek out physical-warmth experiences as passable substitutes for the missing social warmth? Any port in a storm, right?
In the Cyberball studies, participants who had been excluded during the ball-throwing game were more likely to say that they wanted to see people who cared about them later that day. They had been rejected and wanted to feel better by being with family and friends—their social thermostat had registered social coldness and so kicked on the desire for social warmth, just like your home thermostat registers coldness and kicks on the furnace to heat up the house. But the rejected participants had another desire compared to the other (not rejected) participants when rating what they’d most like for lunch that day. They had a stronger desire for warm food and drinks than for cold food and drinks.
If physical warmth can substitute for the missing social warmth in a person’s life, at least somewhat, then perhaps applications of physical warmth could be used as a cheap but effective therapy for emotional disorders, such as depression, which are often characterized by feelings of social isolation and decreased social connection (that is, social coldness). And as it turns out, depression is also characterized by a malfunctioning in the patient’s body cooling system.
Putting two and two together, doctors at one mental hospital recently decided to treat sixteen of their patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder with a single two-hour session of “hyperthermia,” in which a set of infrared lamps is used to warm the entire body. These researchers measured the depression levels of these patients using a standard psychiatric scale both before the treatment and then one week after the single heat lamp treatment. And they found a marked reduction in depression levels, from an average score of 30 before the treatment to under 20 a full week later. The doctors concluded that this whole-body heat treatment produced rapid and lasting relief from the symptoms of depression in their patients and likely does so by improving the functioning of brain pathways that link physical to social temperature.
This clinical study is encouraging news. As we learn more about the unconscious influences on our mind, emotions, and behavior, we can use that knowledge to make positive differences in our lives. Mental Health America, a nonprofit national public service organization, concluded in 2016 that fully 20 percent of adult Americans (more than 43 million people) have a mental health condition, and more than half of them do not receive any treatment. Psychotherapy, for example, is expensive and not readily available to many people. Might they be helped by simple interventions that are available to them? After all, it turns out that a warm bowl of chicken soup really is good for the soul, as the warmth of the soup helps replace the social warmth that may be missing from the person’s life, as when we are lonely or homesick. These simple home remedies are unlikely to make big profits for the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries, but if the goal is a broader and more general increase in public mental health, some research into their possible helpfulness could pay big dividends for individuals currently in distress, and for society as a whole.
Angelina Corcoran, Angelina Jolie, Angelina Dorfman, Angelina Ballerina.
Which of those names is very famous and which are not famous? You instantly recognize the familiar name and confidently report that Angelina Jolie is the most famous. That’s because you’ve heard her name far more times than the other names. (And if you have a preschool child in the house, you might also recognize that gifted mouse, Angelina Ballerina, star of the eponymous cartoon show.) Here how easily you recognize a name is a good guide to how frequently you’ve seen or heard it, which is what fame is all about. This makes sense in general, because the more often something happens in our experience, the more memories we form of it and the stronger or more accessible they will be.
How easily something comes to mind is called the availability heuristic. It is a kind of a shortcut we all use when deciding how likely or frequent a type of event is. The availability heuristic was discovered by Daniel Kahneman and his longtime research partner Amos Tversky. These judgments of frequency matter in our daily lives because we make choices based on how often various things happen or are likely to happen. How often is a crime committed in a neighborhood we are considering moving to? How often have we had a pleasant experience at a certain park? How often have we enjoyed a meal at a particular restaurant? Decisions about where we decide to live, to go out to eat, to play are all based on these judgments.
There are other influences on how easily something comes to mind than just past frequency. Recent experience can make some of our memories easier to recall than others. This is another way that our recent past can carry over to unconsciously influence our judgments. It can mislead you when you base your judgments of past frequency on how swiftly something comes to mind. It can even cause someone to become famous overnight.
Memory researcher Larry Jacoby (famous in his own right) and his colleagues had participants come into his lab one day and study a list of nonfamous names. Then those same participants came back to the lab the next day and he gave them a new list of names. There were names of famous people on that second list, like Michael Jordan, but there were also some nonfamous names from the list the day before, like “Sebastian Weisdorf.” The participants were asked which of the names were of famous people, and which were not. They were more likely than usual to say the nonfamous people were famous, too, if they had happened to have seen that name on the list the day before. This happened even when the experimenters told the participants that if they remembered having seen that name on the list from the day before, it was guaranteed to not be a famous name. But they still thought these names were famous. Whoever he was out there in the world, Sebastian Weisdorf had literally become famous overnight.
So this was an unconscious effect of recent experience on the participants’ judgments of fame. Their recent experience of reading a name made it more available in their unconscious the next day, and they used this availability as a cue that the name was famous. They confused recent experience with long-term experience. (So if any of you parents said Angelina Ballerina was more famous than Angelina Jolie, I’m with you. I watched enough of that show with my daughter in her preschool years for Ms. Ballerina to be the most famous Angelina of all time—in my mind, that is.)
Our memory is therefore fallible. It is not the objective video recording of reality we sometimes think it is or want it to be. It can be fooled by our recent experience, but also by the fact that we pay selective attention to some things and not to others, and what we pay attention to is what gets stored in our memories. If we paid equal and impartial attention to everything that happened then our memories would be a very accurate guide to what happens most frequently around us. But our attention isn’t into equal opportunity. This can (and does) lead to some squabbles at home, like about whose turn it is to do the dishes.
Household chores were actually the topic of a 1979 study in which roommates and spouses were asked how often they took care of daily tasks such as doing the laundry, cleaning, washing the dishes, and taking out the cat litter or walking the dog. You might write down, right now, the percentage of the time you do these things compared to when others do them, then ask everyone else you live with to do the same, and see how the percentages add up. If you were all objectively correct, then of course the total should add up to 100 percent; there can’t be any more than 100 percent of the chores being done. But in the 1979 roommate study the total percentage of times the two people said they did these chores averaged way over 100 percent, because each person thought they did it more than half the time. This couldn’t be true, so what gives?
When you wrote down your percentages, and when the housemates in the study did so, you probably tried to remember the times you did those chores. You could likely see yourself doing them in your mind’s eye. Maybe you also tried to remember when other people did those chores—but of course you wouldn’t have as many memories of them because often you weren’t there when they did them! It’s as simple as that. You will have more memories of yourself doing something than of your spouse or housemate doing them because you are guaranteed to be there when you do the chores. This seems pretty obvious, but we all know how common those kinds of squabbles are, nonetheless. (“I am too the one who unloads the dishwasher! I remember doing it last week!”)
We pay attention to some things and not to others. Moreover, the things we pay attention to are more important to us than other things.
When I was about twelve years old we had a big family reunion and I decided to bring a tape recorder so that we’d have a recording of our grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins for posterity. I come from a large extended family, so it was a really noisy room. During the gathering, our grandma sat on the couch and told some great stories in the middle of all the other conversations. We listened and enjoyed all of them, and a few days after the reunion, we went back to listen to it again. What a disappointment! Just noise, noise, noise, a million people talking at once and no way to pick out her voice from all the other people talking, even though we heard her so clearly at the time. We quickly figured out that we hadn’t noticed the background noise because we had been so captivated by our grandmother’s stories. We’d filtered out what everyone else was saying. The actual, physical sounds in that room at the time, without the mind’s built-in filters, were there on the tape recording.
But what you consider to be important can change, for example, when there is a big change in your life. These dramatic new currents that alter the flow of your experience set into motion a domino effect, changing what is important to you, which changes what you pay attention to, which changes the kinds of memories you have later, and thus your positions on important political and social issues. Yet as Richard Eibach, Lisa Libby, and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University argued in a 2003 research article, we often unwittingly mistake—or misattribute—changes in ourselves for changes in the world.
When you have a baby, especially your first one, suddenly the very mundane things around you take on dangerous, sinister aspects—the stairs, the window blind cords, electric outlets, household cleansers under the sink, prescription medicines on the bathroom countertop—they all seem to be emitting evil laughs and are labeled with skulls and crossbones. The parent’s need and responsibility to protect and keep the child safe changes the parent’s view of the world, makes the parent vigilant and alert to these new potential dangers, and leads the parent to think that the world has become a more dangerous place. Aware of this tendency, Eibach and colleagues analyzed data from a representative sample of 1,800 U.S. citizens over the age of eighteen, who were asked how they thought crime rates had changed over the past eight years. If the respondent had not had a child during this period, their most common answer to this question was that crime had declined (as it in fact had). But if the respondent had a new baby during this period, their most common answer was that crime had increased during this period (as it had not).
These new parents were not aware of how having the baby had changed their attention toward safety issues, which had recast their own recent experiences and thus their body of memories concerning the likelihood of dangers out there in the world. In this fashion, the past becomes a foreign country, as the author L. P. Hartley wrote, and one that we are liable to romanticize. As Eibach and colleagues point out, almost every generation believes that art and music and the work ethic and you name it are not as good now as they used to be, the moral climate has deteriorated, children are more spoiled now than they were twenty years ago, there is more crime, et cetera, et cetera. The funny thing is, historians have noted how the belief that society is changing for the worse is a constant going back thousands of years. The ancient Greeks and Aztecs thought so, too. Eibach and colleagues quote the eminent jurist Robert Bork, who made the point with his legendary pith:
To hear each generation speak of the generation coming along behind it is to learn that our culture is not only deteriorating rapidly, but always has been. . . . No doubt the elders of prehistoric tribes thought the younger generation’s cave paintings were not up to the standard they had set. Given this straight-line degeneration for so many millennia, by now our culture should be not merely rubble but dust. Obviously it is not: until recently our artists did much better than the cave painters.
So if it is not objectively the case that the world is constantly changing for the worse in all these ways, what explains the persistent and prevalent belief that it is? Eibach and his research collaborators suspect that it is because each of us experience many changes as we grow up and mature. Instead of playing all day, we have to go to school; then, instead of being taken care of by our parents, we start to have chores; then as teenagers we work at a fast-food restaurant. Then comes a real job, bills to pay, a stressful commute, and, finally, kids of our own to take care of on top of everything else. We are exposed to meanness and selfishness and hatred and betrayal, from which we are largely sheltered during childhood. Then, of course, our youthful strength and vitality start to fade with age. Need I say more?
While we may not be aware of the manner in which inner transformations trick our minds into seeing outer ones, we are certainly aware, moment to moment, of our emotional state. We know without a doubt when we are happy or sad, angry or hurt, peaceful or anxious. Emotions grab hold of our attention and consciousness and don’t let go. Elizabeth Phelps, an NYU psychologist specializing in emotion and memory, calls attention to the fact that most of our very long-term memories, the things that come to mind when we reminisce about our lives, involve the experience of a strong emotion. These once-recent pasts that become distant but remembered pasts remain in our minds because they so absorbed our attention at the time. They were important in some way, important enough to provoke the strong emotion in the first place.
When we are in the grip of a strong emotion, such as anger, we feel sure we are right, and that we are seeing the world and other people as they really are. That tends to spur us on to act on that belief, not at all recognizing that we are in a temporary emotional state. No clearer example of this could be given than the very public, nationally televised behavior of Steve Coburn, owner of the 2014 Kentucky Derby winner California Chrome. After his horse went on to win the Preakness Stakes, Coburn and his wife were in the owner’s box at New York’s Belmont Park three weeks later to cheer their horse on to victory and the coveted Triple Crown of horse racing. But another horse swept by Chrome on the backstretch and dashed Coburn’s hopes. He was understandably upset, even distraught at having come so close. But he was also angry, because the horse that won the race had not taken part in the other two Triple Crown races and was more rested as a result. Coburn didn’t believe this was fair, and when interviewed on TV after the race went on an angry rant about how the other horse (and owner) didn’t deserve to win because they had ducked the other two races. At the very end of the tirade, his wife told him to stop, but he overruled her, saying emphatically, “No, this needs sayin’!” In the heat of the moment he certainly felt so, but after a day or so, in further interviews he expressed regret for what he’d said and chalked it up to his heated emotions at the time. Coburn’s emotional state, angry then calmed down, determined what he believed to be the truth—as those emotions changed, so did the truth.
Emotions have an even more powerful carryover effect on us than the lingering memories they produce. They put different basic motivations into play, such as aggressiveness, risk-taking, and wanting to make a change in your current circumstances—as we will see in Chapter 8, “Be Careful What You Wish For.” These unconscious motivational states can then exert a profound, catalytic, and even metamorphic influence on what we like, how we think, and what we do. They can change our lives, and sometimes even end them.
In June 2014, a postal worker in the affluent community of Cheshire, Connecticut, noticed that mail at one of the houses on the route had piled up to a worrisome extent. It had been two weeks since the owner, a sixty-six-year-old woman named Beverly Mitchell, had collected any of her mail, so the carrier called the police.
After it became evident that no one inside the house would open the door for them, officers looked for another way in. This turned out to be a less-than-simple matter. Mitchell, as many of her neighbors knew, was a hoarder. The house was so densely packed with clutter that the police weren’t able to use normal entrances, like the front door. Mitchell had been amassing newspapers and other objects for years, effectively turning her home into a warehouse without easily navigable passageways. The police used a backhoe to make a hole in the side of the house and clear debris before entering. It turned out that the first floor had collapsed, requiring the assistance of the Department of Emergency Management as well as other local and national agencies. Three days after first trying to enter, the authorities discovered Mitchell’s body in the basement, where she had been living. She had been crushed and asphyxiated under the debris she had spent years collecting.
I live in a small town near Cheshire, so I read about Mitchell’s horrible, lonely death in the New Haven newspaper soon after it was reported. It was like an episode of the reality TV series Hoarders I had watched. As many people know, hoarding is a significant problem in the United States. Somewhere between 5 and 14 million people in the country are hoarders, according to Scientific American. As shown in the reality TV series, in many cases entire houses are filled many layers high with purchases, many of which are never even taken out of the box or used at all. In nearly every case of the dozens documented in the show, the hoarding began after a traumatic event in the hoarder’s life, such as a divorce or the loss of a child or sibling or parent; very few of these cases were not precipitated by a major and quite emotional life event. In one episode, for example, the hoarding of two twin sisters began when their beloved brother, a soldier in the military, was killed in action. The compulsive purchasing and hoarding became so bad that the twins had to move out of their family home, where they grew up, because it was condemned as a health hazard by the town’s public health department. And so I saw this same psychological pattern play itself out near me: in follow-up news coverage, Beverly Mitchell’s relatives and neighbors recounted how she had lived in that house with her mother all of her life, and that the hoarding had started soon after her mother passed away.
Behavioral economics, the study of human financial and consumer choices, has shown how emotional states put basic motivational states such as aggression or withdrawal into action, and these states in turn change how we value objects when we make buying and selling decisions. For most of us, this applies mainly to when we go shopping. Jennifer Lerner and her colleagues were the first to show how emotions experienced in one situation, such as when watching a sad or disgusting movie scene, carried over to affect purchasing decisions in a second situation, without the person’s awareness that the emotion was still influencing them. Specifically, the persistent emotional state in their unconscious changed the price they were willing to pay to buy something.
Lerner employed another one of Nobel laureate Kahneman’s contributions to behavioral economics, called the “endowment effect.” This phenomenon is one of the most robust and important behavioral economic tendencies in human nature. In the simplest terms, we place more value on an object if we own it than we would place on the same object if we didn’t. Our ownership “endows” the object with additional value. Imagine someone coming into my office and noticing my many coffee mugs. (I have quite the collection.) If I ask that person to give the value of one of them, say my Starbucks Cleveland mug, they may respond something like “Five dollars.” But now another person comes into the room, and I give her that Starbucks mug to keep, and ask her what its value is. She would tend to give a higher amount, say, “Seven dollars and fifty cents.” It is the same old mug in both cases, but we all tend to endow objects with greater value if they are ours and we own them. This makes a lot of practical business sense. It helps us to buy low and sell high.
What Lerner and her colleagues showed in their experiments was that this basic endowment effect was changed and even reversed if the person recently had a certain kind of emotional experience. The emotions Lerner focused on were disgust and sadness. Disgust is a very powerful and practical emotion, from an evolutionary perspective, because it urges us to stay away from anything that might contain harmful germs. When we feel it, we want to get rid of whatever we are holding or smelling or tasting at the time. Basically we want to get away, and stay away, and fast.
Translated into economic behavior, then, disgust should compel one to want to sell what one already has at a lower price than usual, because the underlying motivation is to get rid of what you have; it should also cause a decrease in desire to buy or acquire anything new, which would lead to lower buying prices as well. The emotion of disgust should change the otherwise universal endowment effect by lowering both buying and selling prices. In other words, it should make you bad at business.
In their disgust study, Lerner and associates didn’t mess around. Their participants first had to watch an infamous four-minute scene from the movie Trainspotting, in which a man uses an epically filthy toilet. To make this emotional experience even more powerful (as if it needed to be), they asked participants to write about how they would personally feel if they were in the same situation. Then some of them were given a highlighter as a gift. (If you ask me, they deserved new cars.) But the point of the study was how the participants valued that highlighter. Without being aware of the effect of the movie clip on their valuations, they took a lower amount of money to sell their gift back, compared to the luckier participants in the control group who did not watch the clip. Those without the highlighters offered less money than those in the control condition to buy one. Disgust equaled buy low and sell low.
The effect becomes even more interesting in the case of sadness. Sadness is an emotion that triggers the basic motivation to change one’s state. It makes good sense that when we are sad, we want to get out of that sad state, and so we become more ready to act and do something—almost anything, really—about it. We just want to feel something else! For Lerner’s experiment, participants were shown a clip taken from the movie The Champ—the scene in which the boy’s mentor dies—and were asked to write empathetically about it. (Gee, what a wonderful experience this study must have been for the participants—spend four minutes looking at a disgusting toilet, or watching Jon Voight die. And for this just a highlighter?)
The emotion of sadness was expected to trigger the motivation-to-change emotional state. How would this affect the participants’ buying price for a highlighter, or selling price if they had already been given one? The carryover effect of the emotion actually produced a reversal of the standard endowment effect. In service to the unconscious motivation-to-change state, the participants didn’t require as much money to get rid of the highlighter (lower selling price), but they also wanted to pay more than usual to acquire the highlighter if they didn’t already have it (higher buying price). Buy high, and sell low. You won’t stay in business very long doing that. And it is certainly not a business model we would practice intentionally or deliberately. The behavior is an unconscious and unintended effect of the emotional state.
Clearly the take-home message here is that you shouldn’t go shopping when you are sad. You will be quite willing to pay more to buy the same things compared to when you are not sad. But this is easier said than done, because people often use shopping to help them feel better. It’s fun, like getting yourself a present, and many of us do it to cheer ourselves up. Yet we should beware of the underlying motivation-to-change state, triggered by sadness, that is driving the shopping behavior. There is evidence that compulsive shoppers tend to be depressed, and that shopping helps make them feel happier (or at least less sad). That sadness is at the root of much compulsive shopping is shown by the fact that antidepressant medications are effective in reducing such shopping. Buying new things can help us feel better for a time, but it can ultimately lead us to feel even worse when the bills come in and we have to struggle to pay them. And remember that sadness also makes us willing to pay more for things.
A year or two after the Lerner study about sadness was published, I noticed a change in the type of music being piped in over the speaker system of the supermarket I frequent. Now, it had never been the type of music I would choose to listen to on my own (I never heard any Led Zeppelin being played, for instance), but it was on the whole upbeat and cheery. Then came a sharp change. Suddenly the music was all weepy ballads, sad, minor-chord melodies, and a whole lot of James Taylor. And nothing has changed since then, except the downer songs are new, like Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying.” But the nadir came recently when my wife found me just standing there in the produce section, staring up at the ceiling. Then she heard it, too. The store was playing “If I Die Young,” by the Band Perry—the melancholy chords were bad enough, but the lyrics were coming in crystal clear to all the shoppers, and they are morbid and morose, to say the least.
I’ve noticed similar sad music being played at Walmart, and it turns out that I’m not the only one who has. In 2015, at an annual shareholders meeting where several plans for improving business were proposed, the Washington Post reported, “the one that seemed to draw the most whoops from the crowd was a pledge to ditch a CD that has apparently been on loop in the stores for months and begun to drive employees crazy.” What was the disc that had been playing at the stores ad nauseam? What were the employees sick of hearing? An album of songs by the notoriously weepy Celine Dion.
I confess that going into stores and noticing the relentlessly sad music being played makes me a bit angry, for two reasons. First, that the store would alter its customers’ moods just to get more money out of them (talk about coldhearted). Second, think about the poor employees (especially the teenagers), who, unlike us shoppers—who can get the hell out of there or avoid that store in the future—have to listen to the sad music for hours upon hours each day. Their working conditions may well have a constant, long-term effect on their moods and behavior. This brings me back to the tragic case of that Cheshire woman, who died under the crushing weight of her own purchases.
Losing a loved one is a very, very sad event, of course, and one that subtly continues to affect the deceased’s family and friends for many months, even years afterward. It must be even worse if you continue to live in the house where she lived with you. Every day there are reminders of her, forcing repeated acknowledgments that she is no longer there with you. The unabated sadness could cause you to buy repeatedly in order to continually change your emotional state. Not only can the recent experiences of life linger, but they can hang around a long time, like an albatross, if those recent experiences are repeatedly re-evoked and so continue to affect a person’s behavior over a much longer time period. The most traumatic and emotional of these experiences can thereby precipitate dramatic changes in the individual and in the course of her life. To remedy this, the best solution isn’t to alter one’s temporary state (as through shopping), but to change the more permanent environment that continues to evoke the loss, with all its unconscious consequences for the person who was left behind.
R.I.P., Beverly Mitchell.
Life lingers because the brain lingers. All brain activity, emotional or not, requires chemical transmissions across nerve synapses, and chemical changes do not turn on and off instantaneously like an electric switch. They take some amount of time to settle down and return to their original state. Until they do, your brain goes on sparking and simmering with bits of the past that are not actually there in front of you anymore. Take your “mind’s eye,” for example.
In 1960, George Sperling performed a landmark study that demonstrated the existence of what he called the visual buffer. We can think of this as a kind of temporary storage unit in the mind where information persists after it is gone from the outside world. Participants in his experiments were presented a visual stimulus, but they didn’t know what they would be asked to recall, so they couldn’t consciously focus on any one thing, and they weren’t actively rehearsing or intentionally keeping the information in mind. In addition, there were too many items to memorize. If you had been a participant in those long-ago studies, you would have seen something like this:
You would first be shown the display on the left for a few seconds, then a blank screen in order to produce a delay until the third screen appeared. On the third screen, there was a circle around one of the original display locations, and your job was to say what had appeared in that location—in this case, “8.” You did not know in advance for any of the displays where that circle was going to be. By varying how long the delay screen was up, Sperling could find out just how long the original display had persisted in a participant’s mind’s eye. The shorter the delay, the more likely you would have been to get the right answer, because it would still be right in front of your eyes—or so it would seem to you. The participants in Sperling’s experiment could respond correctly because they could still “see” the right answer in front of them, even though it really wasn’t there at all, except in their own minds.
Another one of the basic judgmental biases that Kahneman discovered is a form of priming effect called anchoring, in which using a certain range of numbers in one context carries over to influence the range of numbers you use in a subsequent context. So, if you are first shown a series of photographs of preschool-age children and asked to estimate the age of each child, you would be using numbers in the range, say, of 2 to 5. But if you were first shown a series of photos of high school students and asked to estimate the age of each of them instead, you would be using numbers in the range of 14 to 18. Then let’s say you are asked a series of questions, such as “How many U.S. presidents have died in office?” or “How many World Series have the Boston Red Sox won?” The correct answer in both cases is 8, but if you’d first focused on the preschool age range you would tend to give lower estimates than if you’d first focused on the high school age range. (This effect doesn’t apply if you already knew the right answer and weren’t guessing.) The range of numbers used in the first task is primed, more active and available, and is more likely to be used in the second judgment task.
As with all of the other carryover effects of recent thought and experience that we’ve discussed, anchoring effects operate unintentionally and unconsciously. Kahneman points out that this applies even to very weighty real-life situations involving numbers, such as in business negotiations over prices for services or supplies, determination of monetary damages to be awarded in court cases, and estimates of future earnings or sales. Even absurd numbers can stick and have their carryover influence, such as in one study in which participants first read that Mahatma Gandhi lived to be a million years old. As Kahneman puts it, you have “no control over the effect and no knowledge of it. The participants who have been exposed to random or absurd anchors . . . confidently deny that this obviously useless information could have influenced their estimate, and they are wrong.”
Given this powerful effect of numerical anchors on our behavior, I can’t help but wonder if, all things being equal, people tend to drive faster in general on Interstate 95 than on Interstate 40 (someone should do a study). I bring this up to give me the excuse to tell the one about the three elderly ladies stopped by the state police for going too slow on a state highway, bottling up traffic for miles behind them. “But officer,” the driver counters, the speed limit sign said 20.” The officer chuckles. “No, ma’am, this is Highway 20, the speed limit is 55.” Then he looks in the backseat and sees the two passengers blanched and wide-eyed, breathing heavily and sweating profusely. “What’s wrong with your friends back here, ma’am?” he asks the driver. “Oh, they’re okay, officer,” she says. “We just got off Highway 143.”
So life lingers on in the mind well after we’ve moved on to something else and don’t think our recent past is influencing us anymore. This applies to the arousal and emotions we feel, like anger and sadness, and how attracted we are to each other. Moods carry over as well, and can bias even our important financial decisions. The effects of our social encounters and whether we feel included or excluded by others linger on, causing us to choose a warm bowl of soup instead of our usual ham sandwich. Our recent experience can cause us to believe global warming is a real problem, or not much of a problem at all, and if the recent experience is intense enough, it can even cause us to worry that our fellow pedestrians are actually zombies. (Fortunately, not very often.)
Everything I’ve discussed in this chapter has related to how our recent past can interfere with our clear perception of the reality of the present. This can cause us to be more attracted to another person than we otherwise would have been, and angrier with others, as in experiences of road rage. It can alter our financial decisions and change our opinion about important world issues. The world changes faster than our minds do, and life lingers in our subjective experience more than it does in reality, making us vulnerable to making bad choices. We strongly assume that what we are thinking and feeling is driven by what’s happening right now in front of us, and we hardly ever question that assumption. Yet quite often something more than what is right here and now is acting upon us. It is the past—our species’ ancient past, our unique unremembered infant past, and our very recent past, just now receding in the rearview mirror of our day. All of these different yesterdays matter, because they are still affecting the most important moment in every person’s life—the only moment Einstein believed actually existed—the present.