How Pleasure Works

"Paul is also an academic psychologist and we’ve co-authored a couple of papers together. He’s a world-class scientist, and he’s also very good at taking sophisticated scientific ideas and portraying them to a broad audience. This book is a wonderful example of that. He’s really interested in how pleasure works, and he says, upfront, that his view is rooted in essentialism. So he says that we like what we like, not, as you might think, because of what it presents to our senses. It’s not just how something tastes or how it looks. Instead, it’s all filtered through our beliefs about what the item is, and that that has to do with essentialism. For example, two cups of water might look identical, but if I’m told that one of them came from a cold, pure mountain spring, and the other came out of a tap in New York City, I’m going to like the one that I think came out of the mountain spring more. That’s because of my beliefs about purity and where things come from, and that appearance is different from reality. These kinds of factors are much more powerful than you might think. Then he uses this to talk about appreciation of artwork, where authenticity is so critical to how we evaluate it. What matters is not just how it looks to you, but whether it’s authentic. It wouldn’t give you that pleasure, and it wouldn’t have the value. He has an example of a painting that was originally thought to be authentic and then turned out to be a reproduction. The value then plunged. But it applies to everyday objects as well. People pay a lot of money for John F Kennedy’s rocking chair because it was his, because it has that particular history. The idea is that maybe a little JFK essence rubbed off on it because he sat in it and touched it. We have these almost magical beliefs that affect our evaluation and our pleasure. It’s possible there might be alternative accounts. In that particular case, people not only give it more value, but they actually want to touch it more. If it’s just that they think, “Oh, it reminds me of him,” why would they want to make contact? There are some funny things about people’s preferences and attitudes to these things. For example, he reports this really clever study that he did with Bruce Hood. They convinced kids that they had a duplicating machine. They had kids bring into a lab either just a regular toy or their special security blanket, their attachment object. They put the toys in the duplicating machine and then asked the kids which they would prefer to have if it were duplicated – the original or the duplicate? When it was just an ordinary object, kids tended to want the duplicate, because they thought it was really cool that they could copy things. But when it was their own special object, they did not want the duplicate. A lot of the kids wouldn’t even let them put it in the machine. It’s as if there is something about the history of an object that gives it some special qualities over and above any material properties of the thing. It goes in two different directions for me. One of them is the developmental side. The developmental piece of it is that essentialism is really all about expecting that there is something that’s not obvious, that’s kind of invisible, that’s underneath. It’s subtle and hard to detect – but you think it’s there anyway. The fascinating thing for me is that we have all this evidence that young kids are essentialist. That is so counter to the usual view of children – as clueless, that you have to hit them over the head with the most salient thing before they pay attention to it. No, they seem to really expect that there’s this hidden structure to the world. That’s a very different view of what’s basic in cognition than you would get from a lot of studies looking at kids. The other thing is that I’ve always been really fascinated by human biases, whether they’re perceptual illusions or reasoning biases or Kahneman and Tversky judgement errors. And essentialism, even though there’s a piece of it that’s quite useful and a piece of it that seems true, also has this component that’s just flat-out wrong. Yes. The way we see the world – we think we’re viewing it in an unbiased way, but that’s not true. There are ways that we see things where we have certain distortions, and essentialism is one of those that’s really interesting. Absolutely. The whole concept of purity, for example, is very essentialist: The idea that the pure version of water is the best."