Pleasure

After decades of thinking about depression, what a relief it is to turn to pleasure! Paul, I envy you for the time you've devoted to sunny aspects of our humanity.
I'm a practicing psychiatrist, not a research psychologist, but as someone who follows the literature on happiness, I'm convinced that How Pleasure Works is a comprehensive and authoritative summary of, to quote the subtitle, "The New Science of Why We Like What We Like." It's also a gracefully written book and a lot of fun, not least because, as the tour guide, you're great company. Who else, considering the ancient philosophical question of what defines the human race, would venture, "Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce?"
Beyond being bold and outlandish, that sort of statement is important because it recognizes that human pleasure is complex. You're moving a step beyond the now-familiar psychology that says we're obese because when our ancestors roamed the grasslands, the survivors were the ones programmed to enjoy sweets, such as ripe fruits, when they were available. Our liking spice might call for a higher-level explanation, perhaps one attentive to concepts like culture and cuisine.
I have questions I'd love to raise about that "new science," but first a word about my response to older approaches. I tend to get grumpy about modern psychology on two counts: It is besotted with Darwin, and it defines the social universe in terms of what is readily measured. The focus on natural selection creates a temptation to conclude that what ever it is (e.g., depression) is good, because it has survived. At the same time, evolutionary psychology compresses the space between modern humans and apes, giving rise to the notion that we're ill-suited to contemporary life. We are, for example, easy prey for marketers, who manipulate us by playing to our instincts. In this sense, whatever is, is bad, because our environment games us.
To the untutored eye, reality is messier. Some common phenomena seem simply harmful. (Yes, I know, evolutionary biology recognizes that possibility, but the temptation is always in the other direction, toward explanation in terms of benefits.) And our distinctly human judgments can be remarkably insightful. Experimental psychology seems to produce a stick-figure version of our doings.
To give an example of what worries me: It's easy to demonstrate that tasters prefer cheap wine when it's presented in fancy bottles. That experiment is cited in almost every overview on the topic of choice. (I'm thinking of three books, each with its virtues, that I've reviewed over the past two years: The Hidden Brain, by Shankar Vedantam; How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer; and Why We Make Mistakes, by Joseph T. Hallinan.) But what we get wrong is easier to discuss than what we get right. How is it that, when they're not fooled, humans can be oenophiles, discerning and enjoying subtle differences between vintages of burgundy? Why don't we all drink milk or simple syrup? Psychology is less attentive to drinks than to the containers that hold them.
The strength of your book is that you approach pleasure as we experience it, with its many contradictions. Why do we savor foods that burn the tongue? Much of your answer derives from a reasonably new movement in psychology, essentialism. That perspective takes into account the notion that humans go beyond thinking about qualities (like piquancy) to interacting with entities (like home cooking). We believe, as you put it, "that things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly and it is this hidden nature that really matters."
You point readers toward essentialism by getting us to think about a person we adore and then to imagine someone with the same traits, an identical twin who resembles the inamorata in every measurable way. We would not love this second person the way we love our spouse or significant other. At the same time, if our subject is a heterosexual man and the clone is a woman, he might find sex with her kinkier than sex with the wife or girlfriend. You cite an Isaac Bashevis Singer play in which a fool from Chelm gets lost, stumbles back into his own village, sees his dull wife, and, thinking her a new acquaintance, becomes aroused.
The example suggests that we are not attracted to properties only (beauty, intelligence) but to the person who has the qualities—or even to the person as contrasted with other people, the person in the context of our lives. This realization takes us from the easily testable (men desire women whose hip-to-waist ratio suggests health and fertility) to the everyday (this man loves that "funny valentine," whose figure is less than Greek).
Immersion in life at this level, whole people, takes psychology out of its comfort zone. I'm tempted to start by asking you just how far the field has moved in this direction. Is psychology able to transcend studies of packaging and return to a more fundamental consideration of why we take pleasure in Malbec, enchiladas, and good friends?
Yours,
Peter
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From: Paul Bloom
To: Peter D. Kramer
Subject: What a "Duplicating Machine" Reveals About Pleasure
Posted Monday, June 14, 2010, at 12:55 PM ET

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Dear Peter,
I've long been familiar with your work on depression, and I can see that pleasure would make for a nice break. But the topic isn't that new to you—you've written movingly about human flourishing and human happiness. In fact, I think much of your impatience with those who talk about the virtues of depression, including those who see it as a biological adaptation, is rooted in your appreciation of how rich and fulfilling a nondepressed life can really be.
Thank you for the kind words about How Pleasure Works and for the thoughtful remarks that followed. What I'll do here is first raise a disagreement, then try to answer your question, and then end with a question of my own.
You worry that modern psychology is besotted with Darwin. But the discovery that our minds have evolved through natural selection provides an important source of constraint on psychological theory. The vision sciences would have never made such progress, for example, if researchers were blocked from considering the adaptive problems that the vision system has evolved to solve. If we lacked the insights of Darwin, we would have never learned so much about facial expressions, or moral intuitions, or mother-child interactions. And I think it would be impossible to develop an adequate theory of the pleasures of sex and food without some appreciation that these pleasures have been shaped in part by the forces of biological evolution.
You have a legitimate beef, but it's with those who believe that all interesting human capacities are adaptations. I don't doubt that such people exist, but none of the evolutionary psychologists I know fall into this category. For instance, Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works is probably the most important book in evolutionary psychology, and it ends with an extended argument that art, music, and religion are all biological accidents, not adaptations.
What about clinical depression? I was convinced by your attack, in Against Depression, on the view that depression is an adaptation. But you weren't being anti-Darwinian when you made this attack; you were making perfectly reasonable arguments for one evolutionary account over another.
You've asked me how far psychology has moved in the direction that I am pursuing. How sympathetic are my colleagues to the view that we resonate, intellectually and emotionally, with deeper aspects of people and things, to their essences?
Unfortunately for me, not so much. The truth is that empiricism still reigns in my field, and the prevailing view is that what really matters for our psychology is information received through the senses. This is why so many psychologists distrust innate ideas and essentialist biases and are so enthusiastic about neural networks and mirror neurons.
Then there is testability. As you put it, it is straightforward to explore the notion that heterosexual men are aroused by a specific physical ratio of the female body. It is harder to test the theory that a man can be aroused simply by knowing that he is observing a certain woman. But it can be done. My book describes research with young children in which a "duplicating machine" is used to replicate their beloved objects, such as Teddy bears and security blankets. We find that the children tend to reject perfect duplicates, consistent with the idea that they see their original objects as possessing distinct and unique essences. Now, adults wouldn't believe in a duplicating machine, but a similar methodology could be used to study the subtleties of male sexual and romantic desire.
Another reason for the appeal of the superficial view is that, at least to some extent, it's right. As I discuss in my book, certain physical features do tend to elicit sexual desire, regardless of our beliefs about the person possessing the features. Some liquids taste better than others, no matter what you think you are drinking. It would be crazy to deny that the pleasures of food, sex, consumer products, paintings, movies, and most everything else can be influenced by their superficial, sensory properties. What I try to do, though, is show that this isn't the whole story or even the most important part of the story.
Here's another example of this: I discuss the mystery of what Paul Rozin has dubbed "benign masochism"—the occasional pleasure we get from controlled doses of unpleasantness, as when watching a tragedy or horror movie. The feelings of sadness and fear are real, triggered in the same way that pornography triggers sexual arousal. If we were purely perceptual creatures, this would never give us pleasure. But our appreciation that these experiences are unreal allows us to throw a mental switch, providing the right distance from what we are seeing. We can use fiction as a safe and controlled way to explore alternative worlds, including worst-case scenarios. It is a form of play—in the case of tragedy and horror, rough play.
Does this make sense to you?
Best,
Paul
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From: Peter D. Kramer
To: Paul Bloom
Subject: How To Explain Why People Like Art?
Posted Monday, June 14, 2010, at 1:04 PM ET

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Dear Paul,
Thank for your kind words. I doubt that we're in disagreement. Any thoughtful person stands in awe of Darwin. And I know that important scientists—to Steven Pinker's name, I'd add Stephen Jay Gould's—believe that key aspects of our humanity developed incidentally. Given that art, music, and even consciousness may be in this domain, the study of pleasure will have to consider dynamics that go beyond natural selection.
A good deal of your own effort to extend psychology's range concerns the problem you study when you run children's blankies through the duplicating machine. As you point out in How Pleasure Works, we have a strong preference for the original over the copy. Fine art plummets in price once it's shown to have been forged. Worth can spread by contact: People will bid substantial sums for Barack Obama's half-eaten breakfast, when similar leftovers at home go into the trash. It's not just the features of an object that matter; we respond to a sense of what a thing is altogether. Any psychology that denies our tendency to look past qualities to essences is wrongheaded.
But I want to ask whether essentialism goes far enough—whether even the expanded approach of the new psychology captures pleasure as it is experienced in daily life. Let's look at one of the human capacities that we suspect is not fully formed by biological selection, our appreciation of art. You approach this topic through an exhaustive list of criteria that affect our response to paintings. We value them because they are "attractive in a low-level way," via pleasing patterns; they depict beautiful things (like flowers); they are familiar; they are associated with positive memories (as of a wedding); they compliment a room; they inflate our status as owners; they may be enhanced by contagion (if someone famous once owned them); and they embody the creative process—that is, the skill of the painter. Those last three criteria are essentialist; they depend on the work's authenticity.
Armed with this set of attributes, I thought of a profoundly pleasing experience. Once, between bits of book business in Madrid, I snuck off to the Prado and the Velazquez room. I expected to focus on Las Meninas. Instead, I was bowled over by the portrait of Pablo de Valladolid, the jester in the court of Philip IV.
What composed the experience? I might say the humanity of the figure, the vulnerability and openness. The image, or the act of making it, expressed a poignant reality: A master painter was recognizing a master actor, although both were also servants. In my viewing, cultural associations were in play. I thought back to Shakespeare's fools and forward to Figaro and the career open to the talents. Manet and Picasso came to mind; the painting sat in a sweep of art that was subject, as it is, to the "anxiety of influence." (Here I am putting in slow motion, and in partial form, what in the moment was a quick response to the Velazquez.) And then there was the canvas's dark background space, modern and primitive. Was there some yet bleaker aspect? Are fools deranged? The painting is existentialism avant la lettre. For me, the image evoked fear, loneliness, and defiance. Also pride—as I say, in humanity. When I say bowled over, I mean that the feelings possessed me. The pleasure arose from the interplay of disparate, sometimes uncomfortable experiences.
It may be that each factor I have named is covered your survey. Also, I may be understating the effect of context: the Prado! Velazquez! (But then why did Las Meninas—larger, more famous, more familiar, more prominently displayed—affect me less?) All the same, when I look at the list of sources of value, I cannot help wondering whether pleasure has escaped. Pleasure seems both an active experience—engagement with the stimulus—and a bolt from the blue. What I'd like psychology's analysis to capture is the Gestalt.
In this context, what you make out as transformative, the new attention to the object, not just its measurable qualities, seems suspect. If genuineness is a requisite aspect of the painting's ability to please; still, it seems a peripheral one. Yes, had the gallery attendant told me that I was seeing a photocopy of the Pablillos, my bubble would have burst. But surely the main aspect of my response was to the composition of the work, and then the context it elicited, the image as it interacted with my consciousness. A display of the remains of Velazquez's breakfast, however priced by the market, would give little of that pleasure.
I want to ask why this fact, that the painting really is the product of a genius's eye and brush, is central to your account. Why is essentialism so intertwined with authenticity? Can essentialism say what it is about the object of art itself, its complex content—not just its provenance—that gives pleasure?
One further thought: Here and in your book, you invoke Paul Rozin's concept, benign masochism, to explain why some pain gives pleasure. Rozin's account strikes me as imperfect or partial. My isolation in the face of the artwork does not feel like play isolation, if play means make-believe. The painting shakes me. I can leave the museum, but I can't escape the inner perturbation. I wonder whether the science of pleasure has another step to walk in this direction. Sometimes, we simply like pain; it confirms our sense of how the world is. That's to say, it appeals to our essentialism, our preference for the authentic in this other sense, the quality of being profoundly true to life.
I suppose that this note is finally one long question, a request for you to review the contribution and the limits of essentialism in our understanding of pleasure. What more does psychology have to say about how we are moved by the encounter with art or with another complex source of joy?
Best,
Peter
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From: Paul Bloom
To: Peter D. Kramer
Subject: Beliefs Shape Our Experience of Pleasure and Pain
Posted Tuesday, June 15, 2010, at 5:26 PM ET

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Dear Peter,
Any serious theory of pleasure has to explain why people like art, including paintings.
You and I agree that there are many factors at play here—a painting might depict something that is beautiful, it might be associated with a positive memory, it might raise one's social status, and so on. And then there is essentialism. Consistent with the broader theory defended in How Pleasure Works, I would argue, building from the work of the philosopher Denis Dutton, that our experience of an artwork is profoundly affected by our belief about what that artwork really is. It matters to us who created it and how it was created.
We agree on this, but you are not convinced that these considerations are sufficient. You tell the story of when you were blown away by a portrait in the Prado, and you ask, skeptically: Can my sort of theory can really capture the exhilaration you felt, this bolt from the blue?
I think it can. And I'm intrigued by your hesitation. Most interesting here is your claim that "surely the main aspect of my response was to the composition of the work"—it was "the object of art itself, its complex content" that blew you away. I am intrigued by how confident you are—the "surely." You are not alone in your confidence. People tend to believe that they are responding to the world as it really is. Isn't it obvious, after all, that we can admire a painting without being contaminated by context and history (in your case, that you're in the Prado, looking at a masterpiece by Diego Velázquez)? Surely what we perceive matters more than what we believe!
It sure seems that way, but this is an illusion, a powerful one that extends to art, to food and drink, and to sex and love. It is shown to be mistaken through the sort of studies we talked about earlier, where psychologists manipulate the information that people receive—this bottle of wine cost $300, this sweater was worn by a celebrity, this painting was completed in 10 minutes. This manipulation affects people's responses in predictable ways, even though—because they believe that pleasure is to be had in the things themselves—they are unaware that they were influenced, and would probably deny it if you told them. The depth of pleasure is largely invisible to us.
Let's look again at the Velázquez. You talk eloquently about how you were possessed by feelings such as fear and loneliness. But now imagine that as you walked into the room, you were momentarily confused, and thought for an instant that you were looking not at a portrait, but an actual man. Your reaction would have been entirely different. This is especially the case with your pain, and the pleasure you got from it. You say that sometimes "we simply like pain," because it confirms our sense of how the world is. But it is never that simple. Nobody would look at a starving child and enjoy the experience, getting a kick out of her authenticity, how her suffering so nicely illustrates the way that the world really is. Your own pleasure was critically dependent on your knowledge that you were regarding an artistic creation, not a real person.
More generally, just as with pleasure, our experience of pain reflects our beliefs about the experience—what it is and where it comes from. Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner recently published a neat study which found that electrical shocks are more painful if you believe that they are given on purpose as opposed to by accident. And I tell the story in my book of a woman who was a quite heavy-duty masochist but who was afraid of getting her teeth cleaned—what the dentist had to offer wasn't the right sort of pain. I agree that not all cases of benign masochism involve make-believe, but one always needs the element of control. This added element may also help explain something else that you mention—the active and engaged nature of certain pleasures, particularly aesthetic ones.
Shakespeare might have been overstating things when he had Hamlet say: "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But it is not far from the truth.
Thank you for doing this with me. This sort of experience—discussing ideas with someone who is sharp and critical yet also sympathetic and engaged—is one of the pleasures that I value the most.
Best,
Paul