Brain Trust (31 page)

Interestingly, though, what mattered most beyond these obvious tools was not how prospective Romeos and Juliets acted but how they reacted. How does Romeo respond when Juliet quips and vice versa? The best responses (in addition to being warm and other-focused) walked a tightrope between too passive and too active. On the too passive side, Romeo might accept and agree with whatever Juliet says, exerting as much direction on the conversation as the proverbial limp-wristed wet towel. On the too
active side, Juliet might drop Romeo’s ball (as it were) and restart the conversation in an entirely new direction of her own choosing. (Of course, the worst thing a conversant could do is drop the ball entirely—withdrawing or failing to respond.)

The trick, according to Finkel, Eastwick, and Saigal, is to avoid extremes in autonomy. Accept your date’s pass, redirect it slightly, and then return the ball—all with warmth and genuine interest in his or her responses.

This acceptance and redirection is the push and pull that creates smoothness.

The original smooth operating paper is
surprisingly accessible and worth a read. You can find it easily with a quick search for “Finkel, Eastwick, Saigal.”

There’s a rich ecclesiastical, scientific, and
popular literature exploring how people have sex. To wit: the
Kama Sutra
describes sixty-four sex acts across ten chapters; we know from fMRI images what sexual arousal looks like in the brain; and at any point we’re but an unrestricted video search away from an online cornucopia (pornucopia?) of sex in action. But “one day my colleague David Buss and I were chatting and I said to him, ‘Nobody’s ever looked at
why
people have sex!’ ” says Cindy Meston, psychologist at the University of Texas–Austin, and author of the book
Why Women Have Sex
.

She and Buss rectified that: 1,549 undergraduates settled on 237 reasons for sex. Women listed as their top ten reasons: (1) I was attracted to the person; (2) I wanted to experience the physical pleasure; (3) It feels good; (4) I wanted to show my affection for the person; (5) I wanted to express my love for the person; (6) I was sexually aroused and wanted the release; (7) It’s fun; (8) I was horny; (9) I realized I was in love; and (10) I was in the heat of the moment.

Men had the same top three, with numbers 2 and 3 switched. Lower in the top ten, men mix in “I wanted to achieve orgasm” and “I wanted to please my partner.”

“The stereotype that men have sex for pleasure and women have sex for love is unfounded,” says Meston. But while the top ten show significant overlap, distinctions emerge lower in the list. “Women don’t have sex because they’re in love,” says Meston, “but because they’re protecting love, stealing love, trying to create love, or doing it out of duty.”

One participant said, “My mother taught me to have sex with my man or someone else will.” Another said, “I’d rather spend five minutes having sex with him than listen to him whine and complain about how horny he is for the next two days.”

Have you ever tasted soap? It’s not disgusting in the way you might imagine mashed worms or a yogurt cup of seagull guano could be. It’s just sort of astringently chemical, olfactorily abrasive, and surprisingly long-lasting—the sensory equivalent of a spanking, which is how eating soap is commonly used. I know because in addition to chomping a bar of Dove for the purposes of this passage, I remember the taste well from my childhood.

Let’s zoom out a click.

“Disgust is an evolutionary mechanism that ensures we don’t touch corpses or feces, and if we do, we wash the affected body part afterward,” says University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz. And in Schwarz’s opinion, morality co-opted this disgust pathway. Simply, immoral behavior provokes the same disgust as nastiness—Schwarz points to the vast majority of world religions that have rituals for washing away your sins. And so it stands to reason that if nastiness and immorality share a pathway, and if nastiness provokes the desire to wash, then so too should immorality provoke the same scrubophilia (now a word).

It’s a nice story, but where’s the evidence?

To find it, Schwarz designed a neat experiment. First, he asked subjects to imagine it’s between them and another person for promotion in a law firm. The competitor has lost an important document and asks you to help her find it. Of course, there in your file cabinet you find the paper. What do you do now? In the ethical condition Schwarz had subjects call or e-mail the competitor and admit they’d found the doc. And in the unethical condition Schwarz had them lie (Sorry, haven’t seen it!).

Subjects were told that was the end of the experiment. Oh, but with the extra time, would subjects mind filling out a quick
product survey rating how likely they would be to purchase a range of products and how much they’d pay for them?

Subjects who lied in the law firm scenario said they were more likely to purchase Purell hand sanitizer and Scope mouthwash, and that they were willing to pay a higher price for those items. That’s cool—immoral subjects wanted to wash—but it gets even cooler: Subjects who called the competitor and lied with their mouths wanted mouthwash, while subjects who e-mailed the competitor and lied with their fingers wanted hand sanitizer.

Not only does immorality provoke the same desire to wash as does nastiness, but it’s just as body-part-specific.

Somewhere deep within your mother’s evolutionary past, she knows that immorality of the mouth requires cleansing with soap. But sins are not the only things you can wash away with cleansers.

In another experiment, Schwarz explored the well-known phenomenon of postrationalization. Generally, if you rank your preferences for a list of ten things, in reality there’s no distinction between numbers five and six—you could put either on top. But the act of choosing something over another—say, number five over number six—creates preference. In subsequent testing, you like number five much more than number six. In this way our brains create certainty from an uncertain world. Schwarz did something similar, but between the first preference ranking and the second test that shows the new, more distinct preferences, he had subjects either opine about antiseptic wipes or actually use the wipes. “Subjects who used the wipes literally wiped away their preferences,” says Schwarz—it was as if they looked at the items anew, without ever having ranked them. Where there’d usually be a huge gap in preference between the object you previously chose and the object you previously spurned, after a quick swipe with an antiseptic wipe, subjects minds’ were again open as the uncarved block.

Similarly, Schwarz had subjects gamble. Typically when people
win a bet, they bet higher in the next round, and when they lose, they bet lower. (Thank you, irrational human psychology.) In his experiment, after the first round of betting, Schwarz gave half his subjects soap to smell and describe, and the other half actually used the soap to wash their hands. Just as with the antiseptic wipes, subjects who washed their hands with soap erased the effect of the previous win or loss—they didn’t bet more or less the next round.

So not only is cleanliness next to godliness, but you can wash away the influence of your past, or “wash your hands of it.” It’s true of your past unsavory actions, irrelevant choices, and pointless experiences. If the past really isn’t relevant to the future—or if you wish it weren’t—a fresh start is only as far as your shower.

Out damn spot, indeed.

In another experiment, Schwarz’s subjects
passed an innocuous person in the hallway on the way to the study—half the time this innocuous plant sneezed, and half the time the plant just walked past. Perhaps it’s not surprising that subjects who’d seen the sneezer estimated the risk of an average American catching a deadly disease as higher than subjects who hadn’t recently been sneezed at. But what’s cool is that their estimation of other risks increased as well—they thought it more likely to die of a heart attack or to be the victim of a violent crime. Schwarz called sneezing a “threat reminder,” affecting perception of both relevant and irrelevant dangers.

There’s a complex relationship between money and pleasure. On one hand, money is the measure of how much we like something—the more people like an object, the higher the price (price balancing supply and demand, and all that). And on the other hand, money can help create pleasure—if you’re told that one bottle of wine is more expensive than another, you’re likely to think the supposedly expensive wine tastes better.

That’s no surprise.

But what is it, exactly, about the pricey wine that makes us like it more? Paul Bloom, Yale psychologist and author of the book
How Pleasure Works
, believes the pleasure we take from something is due not only to the brick-and-mortar thing itself but also to “an object’s history—who created it, who’s been in touch with it, our knowledge about the object.” This is the item’s essence or the ineffable qualities a thing carries with it, and is the root of sentimental value or irrational attachment. It’s why artwork that sells for millions of dollars can lose almost all its value if it’s proved to be a forgery. Yes, the object remains the same, but its essence changes.

Darn art snobs. Darn wine snobs.

But is snobbery really the mechanism that makes art and wine lovers care about a product’s provenance? To study the effect of essentialism, Bloom and coauthor Bruce Hood brought children into the lab. Half brought with them a treasured object—a blanket, stuffed animal, etc.—and half brought with them toys which held no sentimental value. Then Bloom and Hood put kids’ objects into what they told kids was a “duplication machine” that would use nifty science to create an exact duplicate of their toy. After “duplication” the researchers let kids pick which toy they
wanted to take home, the original or the copy. Kids who brought nonsentimental toys tended to choose the copy, which was now coolified by science. Kids who brought attachment objects almost universally stuck with the original. That is, if they let Bloom and Hood put their attachment objects in the machine at all.

Despite (supposed) identical duplication, sentimental value didn’t transfer and so kids stuck with their beloved items, which retained the value-added of their essence.

“We see the same phenomenon in adults,” says Bloom. “We have objects in our lives that are valuable not because of what they’re made of, but because of our attachment to them.” For me, it’s the baseball cards I have boxed in the garage. A complete set of 1986 Topps goes for $24.95 on Amazon, but I remember sorting these cards on the basement Ping-Pong table as a ten-year-old, checking off each number on a dot-matrix printout that ran from one to 792. I knew stats and values. I didn’t let myself buy singles, instead hoping that in each pack I’d plug the gaps. (This is why I have bad teeth.) And despite the $24.95 price tag, I think I’d probably sell for a minimum $9,500. Any buyers?

Back to wine. What creates the very subjective pleasure we get from such luxury objects, and how can you get more of it? According to Bloom, “the more you work to get something, the more you’ll enjoy it. Music is going to sound different if you know about it. The taste of food depends critically on what you think you’re eating. Sexual arousal depends on who you think you’re looking at.”

Not only is knowledge power, but it’s pleasure, too.

So if you want more pleasure from something, increase your knowledge about it. Of course, one critically important piece of information about wine is its price—a high price reflects others’ votes for the wine being good. But if you have other information, you don’t need price. Maybe you like pinot and you know that 2006 was a good year for Santa Barbara wine country. In that
case, you wouldn’t need price to tell you that a 2006 Babcock Pinot is a good wine. You’d pick it off even the bottom shelf and enjoy it just as much as if you’d had to ask the store manager to get it out from behind glass and then paid for it through the nose.