WEBVTT

00:00:00.640 --> 00:00:01.040
Welcome.

00:00:01.120 --> 00:00:02.880
My name is David Petrozowski.

00:00:03.280 --> 00:00:04.800
And I am David Pinsoff.

00:00:05.040 --> 00:00:06.640
And David, what is this?

00:00:07.040 --> 00:00:10.080
Uh as far as I'm aware, it's Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

00:00:10.240 --> 00:00:11.360
And what is the tagline again?

00:00:11.600 --> 00:00:15.200
The tagline is two guys nerding out about evolutionary psychology.

00:00:15.440 --> 00:00:16.560
Oh no, that was the alternative.

00:00:16.960 --> 00:00:17.920
You said the subtext there.

00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:18.960
You should have said the actual.

00:00:19.440 --> 00:00:20.240
You mixed them up.

00:00:20.560 --> 00:00:21.520
Oh, okay.

00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:27.760
So uh it's uh evolutionary psychology the podcast, uh actual evolutionary psychology

00:00:27.760 --> 00:00:29.680
by actual evolutionary psychologist.

00:00:30.250 --> 00:00:30.730
Right.

00:00:30.970 --> 00:00:34.890
And you know, it really is two two guys nerding out about evolutionary psychology, but we

00:00:34.890 --> 00:00:36.650
don't say that because it's not a very appealing title.

00:00:37.210 --> 00:00:38.330
Typically with a guest.

00:00:38.650 --> 00:00:39.690
Yeah, usually we have a guest.

00:00:39.770 --> 00:00:40.970
And we have a day we have a guest.

00:00:41.290 --> 00:00:45.290
We have a great guest, a scary episode, uh, but we'll tell you about that in a second.

00:00:56.840 --> 00:01:02.840
David, uh you know, I love this time of year because um I don't know, I

00:01:02.840 --> 00:01:05.160
always fall was always my favorite time of year.

00:01:05.320 --> 00:01:09.880
Um even in Southern California, I still like the idea that like Halloween's coming around

00:01:09.880 --> 00:01:10.600
the corner.

00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:14.840
Yeah, I think Halloween is my favorite holiday because it combines spooky things with

00:01:14.840 --> 00:01:16.200
candy, which are two of my favorite things.

00:01:18.440 --> 00:01:21.400
I think I mentioned I think I made that exact same joke in the episode, so you'll get to

00:01:21.400 --> 00:01:22.680
hear this joke twice.

00:01:23.210 --> 00:01:23.770
Lucky you.

00:01:24.250 --> 00:01:28.490
You know, I w I once had a teacher who I thought was a really good teacher, and then it was

00:01:28.490 --> 00:01:34.250
in college, and then she literally forgot that she had done the class beforehand, uh

00:01:34.330 --> 00:01:34.970
beforehand.

00:01:35.050 --> 00:01:36.730
And so she just started doing it again.

00:01:36.810 --> 00:01:39.690
And it was literally word for word, and it freaked me out.

00:01:39.930 --> 00:01:42.170
It was like it was like robotic.

00:01:42.330 --> 00:01:43.290
I mean, she was quite old.

00:01:43.370 --> 00:01:46.810
I mean she was lovely, but I think she had just sort of, yeah, but it was interesting.

00:01:46.890 --> 00:01:48.280
But anyway, it was uh yeah.

00:01:48.760 --> 00:01:54.600
Well well that response being freaked out is uh uh what what this episode is about.

00:01:54.680 --> 00:01:56.200
So who do we have uh in this episode?

00:01:56.600 --> 00:02:02.600
We have uh Colton Scrivener and he studies morbid curiosity and horror movies and

00:02:02.600 --> 00:02:04.040
horror genre and fiction.

00:02:04.200 --> 00:02:09.240
He does basically the evolutionary psychology of horror and you know, things all around

00:02:09.240 --> 00:02:09.480
that.

00:02:10.050 --> 00:02:10.370
Yes.

00:02:10.610 --> 00:02:16.610
And today is the day that his book, Morbidly Curious, is coming

00:02:16.610 --> 00:02:16.770
out.

00:02:16.930 --> 00:02:20.690
So you'll get to hear all about his research and decide whether you want to buy his book,

00:02:20.850 --> 00:02:23.730
which spoiler alert, you absolutely should because it's a great book.

00:02:24.290 --> 00:02:24.530
Yeah.

00:02:24.610 --> 00:02:26.370
And David, it sounds like you read it already.

00:02:26.450 --> 00:02:26.690
Yeah?

00:02:27.010 --> 00:02:27.250
I did.

00:02:27.330 --> 00:02:28.930
I got an advanced copy and I blurbed it.

00:02:29.010 --> 00:02:33.090
So if you so another bonus is is if you if you buy the book, you'll get to see my awesome

00:02:33.090 --> 00:02:33.410
blurb.

00:02:33.650 --> 00:02:38.540
Look at this jet setter getting true advanced copies of books and blurbing them.

00:02:39.820 --> 00:02:40.300
All right.

00:02:40.380 --> 00:02:43.340
Uh without further ado, it's a really fun uh episode.

00:02:43.420 --> 00:02:49.420
And if you're if you're interested in uh scary things or if you're anxious, um, I would I

00:02:49.420 --> 00:02:51.260
would say this is a great episode to listen to.

00:02:51.580 --> 00:02:56.220
Yeah, no, we get a lot into into the mechanics of anxiety and how horror can potentially uh

00:02:56.220 --> 00:02:57.900
be therapeutic for anxious people.

00:02:57.980 --> 00:02:59.820
So it's we we cover a lot of ground.

00:02:59.900 --> 00:03:01.770
It's a really uh awesome conversation.

00:03:01.930 --> 00:03:02.650
I had a blast.

00:03:02.810 --> 00:03:04.490
Uh and I'm sure you'll have a blast listening.

00:03:04.810 --> 00:03:05.850
One one quick thing to say.

00:03:05.930 --> 00:03:11.930
We do talk about how it's probably a good idea to like let people who uh are anxious or who

00:03:11.930 --> 00:03:14.890
want to consume uh scary things consume them.

00:03:14.970 --> 00:03:19.370
But one thing we didn't say that I think is worth saying is that does not mean you should

00:03:19.370 --> 00:03:22.890
force people into doing that, because that's a very different thing.

00:03:23.050 --> 00:03:27.380
You should let people uh satisfy their own appetites, which is a very different thing than

00:03:27.380 --> 00:03:30.100
forcing people who don't want to consume something scary.

00:03:30.260 --> 00:03:35.300
I just want to uh note that before, because we don't really mention that in the episode.

00:03:35.700 --> 00:03:36.020
Yes.

00:03:36.260 --> 00:03:37.220
Good caveat.

00:03:37.620 --> 00:03:42.020
Well, without further ado, let us begin the spookiness.

00:03:47.060 --> 00:03:48.470
Oh, that was skilled.

00:03:48.630 --> 00:03:49.910
Wow, David, that's a really good go.

00:03:50.470 --> 00:03:51.990
Is that a good good sound?

00:03:52.790 --> 00:03:55.830
So uh uh so David, happy Halloween.

00:03:56.150 --> 00:04:00.870
Uh happy Halloween uh to you as well and to you, Colton Scrivener, uh who is with us here

00:04:00.870 --> 00:04:04.390
to talk about all things uh spooky and horrifying.

00:04:04.630 --> 00:04:07.030
Yeah, why we celebrate Halloween anyway?

00:04:07.190 --> 00:04:08.790
Yeah, I I love Halloween.

00:04:08.870 --> 00:04:11.750
I don't know uh d how do you feel about Halloween, David?

00:04:12.400 --> 00:04:14.480
I love it's actually probably my favorite holiday.

00:04:14.560 --> 00:04:18.560
I mean, it's candy, it's spooky, like what it's the two of my favorite things.

00:04:18.720 --> 00:04:18.880
Yeah.

00:04:19.040 --> 00:04:23.200
Colton, how how uh we'll we'll say hello to you in a second, but we want to get right into

00:04:23.440 --> 00:04:24.560
how do you feel about Halloween?

00:04:24.640 --> 00:04:27.280
Like, did you have uh did you enjoy Halloween as a kid?

00:04:27.600 --> 00:04:27.920
Sure.

00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:30.080
I think most kids probably enjoy Halloween.

00:04:30.400 --> 00:04:31.760
Maybe for different reasons, I don't know.

00:04:31.840 --> 00:04:34.480
But uh, most kids at least enjoy the the candy aspect of it.

00:04:34.560 --> 00:04:36.640
And and you know, the play pretend aspect.

00:04:36.720 --> 00:04:39.450
I think that uh every kid probably enjoys that.

00:04:39.690 --> 00:04:39.930
Yeah.

00:04:40.010 --> 00:04:43.530
Were you uh did you have a thing where you like made your own costumes?

00:04:43.610 --> 00:04:46.970
Were you super into costumes, or was it like a last minute thing?

00:04:47.290 --> 00:04:52.330
I am not crafty enough to make my own costume and and make it any kind of fun for anyone.

00:04:52.490 --> 00:04:57.850
So uh, but I am in love love the costume thing, still do it as an adult for uh certain

00:04:57.850 --> 00:05:01.290
events here in town, but um yeah, definitely don't make my own.

00:05:01.520 --> 00:05:01.840
Cool.

00:05:02.080 --> 00:05:06.640
Were were were you did you dress like more of more in more of a standard spooky way, like

00:05:06.640 --> 00:05:10.720
you dressed as like a scary serial killer or monster, or were you more like the Spider-Man,

00:05:10.960 --> 00:05:12.240
Superman type?

00:05:12.560 --> 00:05:18.320
I think I was uh I was usually a dead something, like a dead army guy or a dead

00:05:18.560 --> 00:05:21.360
whatever, or a vampire, or just like things that were dead.

00:05:21.670 --> 00:05:23.350
Even is it even as a child.

00:05:23.590 --> 00:05:25.750
Yeah, like not real scary, but still dead.

00:05:25.910 --> 00:05:26.150
Okay.

00:05:26.310 --> 00:05:26.790
Interesting.

00:05:26.950 --> 00:05:29.190
We're just gonna ask you about your Halloween experiences.

00:05:29.510 --> 00:05:30.230
Yeah, just my kid.

00:05:30.310 --> 00:05:31.270
Just ask me about my childhood.

00:05:31.590 --> 00:05:35.910
That's exactly we orbit around that all the time on this podcast.

00:05:36.150 --> 00:05:36.710
So yeah.

00:05:36.950 --> 00:05:37.190
Yeah.

00:05:37.430 --> 00:05:42.790
No, honestly, um uh I'm glad we have you on, uh, just because my daughter is very morbidly

00:05:42.790 --> 00:05:48.760
curious and um understanding your research and the development of morbid curiosity has

00:05:48.760 --> 00:05:54.280
helped me to deal with that as a parent and sort of harness it and uh

00:05:54.280 --> 00:05:55.240
nurture it.

00:05:55.400 --> 00:05:59.560
Um but yeah, it's been it's been very cool to to witness.

00:05:59.720 --> 00:06:02.520
Um just uh one one anecdote.

00:06:02.680 --> 00:06:06.360
Um I was uh I was trying to get her to brush her teeth because she doesn't like brushing

00:06:06.360 --> 00:06:07.000
her teeth.

00:06:07.160 --> 00:06:12.120
Um and so I decided to show her pictures of rotting teeth to show her what happens to your

00:06:12.120 --> 00:06:13.400
teeth if you don't brush it.

00:06:14.010 --> 00:06:16.490
And it was actually a very effective way of getting her.

00:06:17.130 --> 00:06:19.370
Now she she always is willing to brush her teeth.

00:06:19.530 --> 00:06:22.170
But it had this um side effect.

00:06:23.290 --> 00:06:27.770
It had a side effect, which is now she just wants to look at pictures of rotting teeth for

00:06:27.770 --> 00:06:28.090
fun.

00:06:28.810 --> 00:06:31.210
And now I like I have to now I can use it as a reward.

00:06:31.290 --> 00:06:35.210
Like, oh, if you clean up your toys, I'll let you look at pictures of rotting teeth.

00:06:36.220 --> 00:06:41.580
In J David, in Germany, there's like a part of anti-smoking campaign is there's like yeah

00:06:41.660 --> 00:06:45.260
at the grocery store in the checkout aisle, there's like you can buy cigarettes and there's

00:06:45.260 --> 00:06:51.020
pictures of like really like, you know, d like I don't even know how to describe it, but

00:06:51.020 --> 00:06:54.540
like really gross like medical pictures that are the results of smoking.

00:06:54.700 --> 00:06:57.660
And I'm just imagining your daughter going, oh like grabbing the cigarette.

00:06:58.780 --> 00:06:59.740
I'll take two.

00:06:59.970 --> 00:07:01.090
Yeah, exactly.

00:07:01.330 --> 00:07:04.930
So uh David will be here all week for uh parent hacks.

00:07:05.090 --> 00:07:05.810
So cool.

00:07:05.970 --> 00:07:06.290
Yeah.

00:07:06.530 --> 00:07:12.210
Um Colton, uh can you uh so I don't know if you want to just talk about morbid

00:07:12.210 --> 00:07:17.090
curiosity as a broad thing, but one question I think a lot of people will have is so you're

00:07:17.090 --> 00:07:22.210
taking an evolutionary approach, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, to our interest in

00:07:22.620 --> 00:07:28.220
things that are gross or scary or sort of just to understand

00:07:28.540 --> 00:07:34.460
what swath of science or human phenomena you're carving out, how would you characterize the

00:07:34.460 --> 00:07:36.620
thing that you are interested in?

00:07:36.700 --> 00:07:41.580
That's sort of been the north star for your writing and your research and what you're

00:07:41.580 --> 00:07:42.300
thinking about?

00:07:42.860 --> 00:07:47.260
Yeah, I mean I was definitely trained, was trained as a in anthropology and biology.

00:07:48.060 --> 00:07:52.530
And so but I'm interested in humans and so in the the wonderful world of science, that

00:07:52.530 --> 00:07:54.370
means you do psychology things.

00:07:54.690 --> 00:07:58.610
But I do take a dip a different perspective, obviously, than most psychologists, but pretty

00:07:58.610 --> 00:08:03.650
similar to the two of you, which is I think that uh, you know, humans are evolved creatures

00:08:03.730 --> 00:08:09.490
and that influences um our psychology and can help if we use an evolutionary perspective,

00:08:09.570 --> 00:08:12.770
it can help us uh understand human behavior pretty well.

00:08:13.010 --> 00:08:18.160
And um, you know, there's been a lot of work on why humans are or the fact that humans are

00:08:18.160 --> 00:08:23.760
sort of drawn to threats or drawn to negativity or drawn to things that um

00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:25.520
they may otherwise try to avoid.

00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:30.160
But as far as I can tell, uh when I started researching this, nobody had really tried to

00:08:30.160 --> 00:08:36.160
explain that any further than, oh yeah, we uh negative things jump out to us, you know, um,

00:08:36.710 --> 00:08:40.870
or in some cases, like oh threatening things seem to jump out to us, even more than

00:08:40.870 --> 00:08:41.910
negative things.

00:08:42.150 --> 00:08:48.150
Um, and so what I've done is try to understand why why that is, but then also why we not

00:08:48.230 --> 00:08:52.230
not only why does it jump out to us, but why do we seek it out and create it and enjoy it

00:08:52.470 --> 00:08:52.790
even?

00:08:53.190 --> 00:08:58.310
Um yeah, and then and then further than that, I mean, um working on a paper right now with

00:08:58.310 --> 00:09:03.500
Edgar Du Borg, um looking at can we understand the horror genre specifically from an

00:09:03.500 --> 00:09:09.020
evolutionary perspective and sort of what inputs um is our mind taking from a horror movie

00:09:09.020 --> 00:09:11.420
that that make it interesting, that make it scary?

00:09:11.580 --> 00:09:16.140
Um, and how can we better understand the emotion of fear by looking at the entertainment we

00:09:16.140 --> 00:09:16.780
produce?

00:09:17.260 --> 00:09:17.740
Cool.

00:09:18.300 --> 00:09:24.300
Um, one of the things that Dave and I talked about doing um as just adaptationists is

00:09:24.620 --> 00:09:28.130
you just go around the world, and whether it's like the thing your daughter or your son is

00:09:28.130 --> 00:09:33.090
doing, or just people are doing online, is sort of just being an anthropologist about it

00:09:33.170 --> 00:09:37.650
and sort of thinking about well, what what are the combination or cocktail of adaptations

00:09:37.650 --> 00:09:38.850
underlying this thing?

00:09:39.170 --> 00:09:44.050
And um I I actually find myself being kind of doing that um

00:09:44.290 --> 00:09:47.280
implicitly, like about Halloween and horror stuff.

00:09:47.360 --> 00:09:50.080
And I don't even actually know what that category is.

00:09:50.160 --> 00:09:53.200
And I'm curious if you have some intuition about what that category is.

00:09:53.360 --> 00:09:59.360
But like to me, it's I find it interesting, for example, that like along with obviously

00:09:59.360 --> 00:10:05.040
things like, you know, scary, threatening things, there's also like things being old and

00:10:05.040 --> 00:10:06.240
like cobwebby.

00:10:06.720 --> 00:10:11.040
And just, and I don't know how much of that is sort of like, you know, universal, how much

00:10:11.040 --> 00:10:15.870
of it is just sort of like the cultural evolution baggage of just like this is

00:10:15.870 --> 00:10:18.110
traditionally what it's like, like a Victorian home, right?

00:10:18.190 --> 00:10:18.670
Like, right.

00:10:18.830 --> 00:10:23.070
But but it's also interesting that it's like an older architecture or there's evidence of

00:10:23.070 --> 00:10:25.070
like past agents and it's unclear.

00:10:25.230 --> 00:10:31.070
So like I'm just I am personally very curious about like, and I would love to hear

00:10:31.150 --> 00:10:37.120
like what is your it's if you if you've been thinking about like what's the grammar of what

00:10:37.360 --> 00:10:38.400
this category is?

00:10:38.480 --> 00:10:43.680
And is it incidental or is it like a feature that there's like

00:10:43.920 --> 00:10:46.080
cobwebs and dust, for example?

00:10:46.400 --> 00:10:46.640
Yeah.

00:10:47.360 --> 00:10:49.040
Well, I think, I mean, that's a big question, right?

00:10:49.120 --> 00:10:54.960
Because I think there's the question of what are the features of all the dangerous

00:10:54.960 --> 00:10:56.080
things we might be interested in.

00:10:56.160 --> 00:11:00.640
And then there are the features of what are those things that we seem to latch on to and uh

00:11:00.880 --> 00:11:02.720
produce in material culture, right?

00:11:02.830 --> 00:11:03.390
And replicate.

00:11:03.470 --> 00:11:05.070
So kind of what are those broad features?

00:11:05.150 --> 00:11:09.150
And then what are the ones that really seem to get our attention to the extent that we tell

00:11:09.150 --> 00:11:12.510
stories about them and then consume those stories, spend resources to consume those

00:11:12.510 --> 00:11:12.830
stories.

00:11:12.990 --> 00:11:13.150
Right.

00:11:13.390 --> 00:11:16.670
I think the cobweb thing and like abandoned buildings thing is interesting.

00:11:16.830 --> 00:11:20.590
I did an interview, I don't know, a couple of months ago about abandoned theme parks.

00:11:20.670 --> 00:11:25.150
And we sort of explored that question a little further because it's something that I hadn't

00:11:25.150 --> 00:11:25.950
thought about too much.

00:11:26.110 --> 00:11:31.080
I mean, I think one just sort of from my gut and having studied these things, one thing

00:11:31.080 --> 00:11:35.640
that it might be is that, you know, if you see somewhere that looks like it has a lot of

00:11:35.640 --> 00:11:41.560
resources, could be a good place to live, and you see that it's abandoned, you might ask,

00:11:41.720 --> 00:11:44.920
well, why would people leave such a rich place of resources?

00:11:45.000 --> 00:11:45.160
Right.

00:11:45.240 --> 00:11:48.440
And one answer is that, well, because it's actually more dangerous than it looks, right?

00:11:48.760 --> 00:11:50.520
I think we do that with ancient civilizations.

00:11:50.600 --> 00:11:54.600
I think that's one reason we find like the ancient Mayan civilizations and just ancient

00:11:54.590 --> 00:11:56.750
civilizations generally kind of interesting to us.

00:11:56.910 --> 00:12:00.430
It's like, well, if they built all these great things, they must have had great resources.

00:12:00.590 --> 00:12:01.310
So what happened?

00:12:01.390 --> 00:12:02.590
Or where did they go?

00:12:02.830 --> 00:12:06.830
And you know, the obvious answer, and the one that archaeologists often look to is

00:12:06.830 --> 00:12:08.030
disaster, right?

00:12:08.350 --> 00:12:13.950
And so if this great civilization in this case didn't see this

00:12:13.950 --> 00:12:15.950
disaster coming, like what did they miss?

00:12:16.110 --> 00:12:16.830
What got them?

00:12:16.990 --> 00:12:18.270
And could it happen to me, right?

00:12:18.430 --> 00:12:19.550
Could it happen to us?

00:12:19.790 --> 00:12:21.720
Um, so that's that's my first instinct.

00:12:21.800 --> 00:12:26.520
And of course, cobwebs, at least in you know, I don't know, uh, I'm not a cobweb expert, so

00:12:26.520 --> 00:12:30.120
I don't know if they show up around the world and different kinds of uh materials, but you

00:12:30.120 --> 00:12:35.240
know, in the US at least, uh and in many places, cobwebs signify we we understand that that

00:12:35.240 --> 00:12:39.000
signifies it's been abandoned for a while or not taken care of, and so if we see them in a

00:12:39.000 --> 00:12:44.410
in a big beautiful house, like a big castle, Again, there's like all these resources.

00:12:44.490 --> 00:12:47.690
We understand all these resources were poured into building this beautiful castle.

00:12:47.850 --> 00:12:49.930
Someone of great power must have lived there.

00:12:50.090 --> 00:12:52.010
And yet they're gone and their family is gone.

00:12:52.090 --> 00:12:52.890
So what happened?

00:12:53.050 --> 00:12:53.290
Yeah.

00:12:53.450 --> 00:12:57.050
So I think there are those are more like cues, cues of danger in some ways, right?

00:12:57.290 --> 00:12:59.690
Like acc accidental or incidental cues of danger.

00:12:59.930 --> 00:13:00.090
Yeah.

00:13:00.170 --> 00:13:00.650
It's interesting.

00:13:00.730 --> 00:13:03.930
As you're saying that I'm imagining like the opening scenes of a movie and like what's

00:13:03.930 --> 00:13:04.490
scarier?

00:13:04.650 --> 00:13:09.130
Like imagining like all the three of us walking through a town and there's nobody in it.

00:13:09.370 --> 00:13:14.960
And you go into the houses and like even the stove is on, and you know, there's still food

00:13:14.960 --> 00:13:20.480
cooking and burning, and like everything is perfectly, but everybody's gone.

00:13:21.200 --> 00:13:23.600
Well, that's exactly the first episode of the Twilight Zone, isn't it?

00:13:23.680 --> 00:13:25.840
Like he's walking around and it's just like an empty town.

00:13:26.000 --> 00:13:26.160
Right.

00:13:26.480 --> 00:13:28.560
It's very eerie, very creepy.

00:13:28.960 --> 00:13:34.800
Yeah, that's uh so I love that, and I love that that example then also highlights this

00:13:34.880 --> 00:13:39.360
sort of if you take a step back, and I love this about an evolutionary approach too, is you

00:13:39.360 --> 00:13:45.170
think about like were organisms, and it's we're talking we're starting to like get into

00:13:45.170 --> 00:13:45.410
that.

00:13:45.650 --> 00:13:51.170
What we're talking about is curiosity or information seeking about

00:13:51.810 --> 00:13:55.810
a class of things that might be relevant for it.

00:13:55.970 --> 00:14:01.640
Like in the same way a rat might be interested in like the things around a dead rat, so

00:14:01.640 --> 00:14:06.040
long as it doesn't like kill the rat for sort of obvious reasons, right?

00:14:06.280 --> 00:14:12.280
Um, and maybe that's too facile, but like I like that like I was thinking about, you

00:14:12.280 --> 00:14:15.000
know, like whenever we have somebody on, I sort of think about what to think about.

00:14:15.080 --> 00:14:21.000
And I think like what liking hu like horror or like liking things that are a little bit

00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:26.430
gross or scary to me feels like very deeply human in the same way of like getting paper

00:14:26.430 --> 00:14:27.950
cuts or like sneezing is.

00:14:28.030 --> 00:14:31.470
You know, it's just like one of these things that's just very human.

00:14:31.630 --> 00:14:36.030
Um, is when I think importantly, though, there's a you don't have to like something to find

00:14:36.030 --> 00:14:36.830
it interesting either.

00:14:36.910 --> 00:14:40.590
There's actually like empirical evidence for that that you can distinguish liking and

00:14:40.750 --> 00:14:41.630
finding things interesting.

00:14:41.710 --> 00:14:43.150
Now you can have both, right?

00:14:43.230 --> 00:14:46.750
You can like something and find it interesting, but you can certainly find things

00:14:46.750 --> 00:14:51.550
interesting and be intrigued and drawn and have these approach motivations motivations

00:14:51.550 --> 00:14:54.320
toward it without actually enjoying it.

00:14:54.480 --> 00:14:54.640
Right.

00:14:54.800 --> 00:14:57.120
And I think morbid curiosity does a little of both of those, right?

00:14:57.200 --> 00:15:01.360
It kind of has, it's kind of got a two-pronged uh access to our minds.

00:15:01.520 --> 00:15:05.360
Um, and I'm still kind of teasing that apart, like what it looks like and why in some

00:15:05.360 --> 00:15:09.360
people it's approach and like or interest and like and why in some people it's just

00:15:09.360 --> 00:15:10.000
interest.

00:15:11.760 --> 00:15:14.880
So I feel like we um we sort of skipped ahead a bit.

00:15:15.450 --> 00:15:19.450
We didn't get to the foundation, the basic question that you that has been driving your

00:15:19.450 --> 00:15:23.050
research, which is why are we into this stuff?

00:15:23.290 --> 00:15:27.290
You know, from a naive psychological perspective, you might expect us to entertain

00:15:27.290 --> 00:15:32.410
ourselves with images of sunshine and rainbows and happy families and peaceful uh

00:15:32.650 --> 00:15:33.610
interactions.

00:15:33.770 --> 00:15:39.480
Um, you know, uh and yet uh if you look at the actual contents of the entertainment and the

00:15:39.480 --> 00:15:43.960
fiction that we consume, it is filled with with blood and gore and and terror.

00:15:44.120 --> 00:15:49.640
So why would we if we have the option to entertain ourselves with any kind of imaginary

00:15:49.640 --> 00:15:55.240
world that we want, why would we pick the scariest, darkest, most awful stuff to

00:15:55.240 --> 00:15:56.280
entertain ourselves with?

00:15:56.440 --> 00:15:59.000
Why why are we into this stuff uh to begin with?

00:15:59.480 --> 00:16:03.000
Well, I think it's because um, you know, historically we've encountered it in the real

00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:03.560
world, right?

00:16:03.640 --> 00:16:08.630
And anytime you can learn about something cheaply, uh, from an sort of an ecological

00:16:08.630 --> 00:16:10.710
perspective, your mind snags that, right?

00:16:10.870 --> 00:16:13.430
It's just like the uh the drink that Dave is drinking there.

00:16:13.590 --> 00:16:15.190
It probably has a bit of a sweet taste, right?

00:16:15.270 --> 00:16:19.430
It probably tells his mind that uh it's just this is high calorie, it's good, you should

00:16:19.430 --> 00:16:20.150
consume it.

00:16:20.310 --> 00:16:25.510
Um, I think that similar thing happens with fear when we see uh something dangerous on our

00:16:25.510 --> 00:16:29.510
screen, or even we're imagining it or reading it in a book, hearing a story from someone,

00:16:29.750 --> 00:16:34.720
our mind is getting one set of input information that says, here's some important

00:16:34.720 --> 00:16:36.400
information, you should pay attention.

00:16:36.720 --> 00:16:40.400
But the sort of breaks aren't really applied that would normally be applied because we're

00:16:40.400 --> 00:16:44.240
not getting input saying the dangerous thing is in front of us, which is how we've, which

00:16:44.240 --> 00:16:47.200
is how almost every animal ever experiences threat, right?

00:16:47.280 --> 00:16:51.840
Is in order to learn about it, you kind of have to be there because they don't have

00:16:51.890 --> 00:16:55.730
material culture that they transmit and they don't have sophisticated language that they

00:16:55.730 --> 00:16:58.210
can uh tell stories about dangerous things.

00:16:58.290 --> 00:16:59.810
And so they kind of have to learn about them firsthand.

00:16:59.890 --> 00:17:00.290
And they do.

00:17:00.370 --> 00:17:01.650
You do see that in the animal kingdom.

00:17:01.730 --> 00:17:06.850
You see something like morbid curiosity in a lot of animals, but it's much more restricted.

00:17:07.010 --> 00:17:12.130
Like you only see it in certain circumstances, whereas in humans, we can consume it almost

00:17:12.130 --> 00:17:13.010
anytime, anywhere.

00:17:13.090 --> 00:17:14.850
So it's a it's a kind of like the candy thing, right?

00:17:14.930 --> 00:17:16.690
It's kind of like why do we like sweet things?

00:17:16.850 --> 00:17:18.880
Well, it's a cheap way to get calories.

00:17:19.040 --> 00:17:23.200
Even when we shouldn't want calories, sometimes it's a cheap way to get calories and we we

00:17:23.200 --> 00:17:24.400
latch onto that.

00:17:24.880 --> 00:17:25.120
Yeah.

00:17:25.280 --> 00:17:28.960
This might be a good place to talk about sort of uh signal detection or error management,

00:17:29.040 --> 00:17:29.840
too, right?

00:17:30.000 --> 00:17:31.840
Is that sort of something you've thought about?

00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:37.680
So, in other words, you know, if there's a really high cost or really high threat thing,

00:17:37.920 --> 00:17:42.480
it's not always clear whether or not you're gonna learn something, but there's two types of

00:17:42.480 --> 00:17:43.520
errors to make, right?

00:17:43.600 --> 00:17:49.350
One is you sort of pursue or look into this dangerous or scary or b or high

00:17:49.510 --> 00:17:55.190
cost thing and don't don't learn anything, um, versus you you you could have,

00:17:55.350 --> 00:17:56.390
but you don't.

00:17:56.710 --> 00:18:02.710
And uh, and then you know, so for example, um, you know, I'm when I lived in Berlin, I did

00:18:02.710 --> 00:18:05.190
open water swimming, I moved here to Santa Barbara.

00:18:05.350 --> 00:18:09.110
Uh, there's the the Pacific Ocean here is a great white nursery, right?

00:18:09.190 --> 00:18:14.000
So I was like, I'm gonna look into everything I can about great white sharks, um, you know,

00:18:14.160 --> 00:18:18.320
to just settle on am I actually going to go swimming and what's my relative risk?

00:18:18.480 --> 00:18:24.400
Um is that is that thing of sort of uh you know, because the question, one

00:18:24.480 --> 00:18:27.520
question is sort of like what lessons are people learning, if at all?

00:18:27.680 --> 00:18:32.800
And is that sort of like a klogginess of the system that all consume things that are scary

00:18:32.960 --> 00:18:35.360
just because that's just the way the system is built?

00:18:35.520 --> 00:18:37.600
Or are people actually learning lessons?

00:18:38.080 --> 00:18:39.360
I think there's a little of both.

00:18:39.520 --> 00:18:43.570
I think um, you know, most people when they go to watch a they buy a ticket to a horror

00:18:43.570 --> 00:18:48.210
movie, you don't really um think about like, oh, I'm going to learn something from this,

00:18:48.370 --> 00:18:48.690
you know.

00:18:48.850 --> 00:18:50.130
Uh some people, some people do.

00:18:50.210 --> 00:18:54.290
I've actually talked to people in studies that uh, especially with true crime, they'll say,

00:18:54.450 --> 00:18:57.410
I watched this to kind of pick up on what I would have missed, right?

00:18:57.490 --> 00:18:58.930
Uh, if this were to happen to me.

00:18:59.090 --> 00:19:04.660
And there's some evidence that uh feeling vulnerable is correlated with um, you know, your

00:19:04.660 --> 00:19:08.180
chances of like truly feeling vulnerable and seeking out these things are correlated with

00:19:08.180 --> 00:19:11.860
your chances of being a victim of a crime or having been a victim of a crime in the past.

00:19:12.020 --> 00:19:17.140
And so I think some people do actively seek it out to learn something and they're sort of

00:19:17.140 --> 00:19:17.860
aware of that.

00:19:18.020 --> 00:19:22.180
But most people just do it because it's because it feels fun, it feels enjoyable.

00:19:22.260 --> 00:19:24.340
And then the question is: well, why does it feel fun?

00:19:24.500 --> 00:19:25.620
Why does it feel enjoyable?

00:19:25.780 --> 00:19:30.420
And one answer is is that um learning is intrinsically rewarding.

00:19:30.630 --> 00:19:34.470
Um, you know, if you're updating your model of the world and updating feeling like you're

00:19:34.470 --> 00:19:38.870
gaining valuable information on the cheap, that's intrinsically rewarding, even if we don't

00:19:38.870 --> 00:19:40.950
consciously recognize that.

00:19:43.910 --> 00:19:44.230
Okay.

00:19:44.710 --> 00:19:49.830
So so the reason why we're into horror is because we're learning things um and we're

00:19:49.830 --> 00:19:55.420
learning things cheaply um about really important things that we

00:19:55.660 --> 00:19:58.140
should want to learn about from an evolutionary perspective.

00:19:58.380 --> 00:20:02.380
If we're gonna learn about any those are like those are like really high value things, or

00:20:02.700 --> 00:20:03.900
things of very high importance, right?

00:20:04.060 --> 00:20:09.340
Whereas you know, food is important and mating is important, um, but they're not one-offs.

00:20:09.420 --> 00:20:13.500
It's like if you make a mistake with food or make a mistake with mating, usually you can

00:20:13.500 --> 00:20:15.420
get another chance to get an apple or a mate.

00:20:15.580 --> 00:20:18.940
Uh, if you make a mistake when it comes to a dangerous predator, you may not have another

00:20:18.940 --> 00:20:19.660
shot, right?

00:20:19.740 --> 00:20:23.590
And so they're like really high value uh targets are really high value information.

00:20:23.750 --> 00:20:28.070
And so um I think it's especially potent to us, which is probably why we see this threat

00:20:28.070 --> 00:20:32.630
bias that humans have where it kind of captures our attention above and beyond almost

00:20:32.630 --> 00:20:33.430
anything else.

00:20:34.070 --> 00:20:34.310
Yeah.

00:20:34.390 --> 00:20:35.830
Can I can I interject too?

00:20:35.910 --> 00:20:40.550
I think one thing there's and David alluded to this in an earlier episode, there's an idea

00:20:40.550 --> 00:20:45.660
that sort of there's a reason why we have episodic memory versus semantic memory.

00:20:45.820 --> 00:20:50.060
Episodic meaning for people who don't know is that there's the details of an event.

00:20:50.140 --> 00:20:53.740
So, you know, do you remember the first time you went on a Ferris wheel, for example,

00:20:53.980 --> 00:20:56.220
versus just the declarative statement?

00:20:56.380 --> 00:20:59.020
You know, I was on a Ferris wheel, but you don't remember the event.

00:20:59.180 --> 00:21:03.260
And it seems to me, and Colton, Colton, you can tell me if this is correct, is that if I

00:21:03.260 --> 00:21:08.510
think about it, you know, hearing about, you know, oh, sharks are dangerous, like that's

00:21:08.670 --> 00:21:09.310
super boring.

00:21:09.470 --> 00:21:10.110
I don't care.

00:21:10.270 --> 00:21:12.190
I would not like choose to do that.

00:21:12.350 --> 00:21:18.350
But if if I if you told me a story about a shark encounter or a video of it, I would

00:21:18.350 --> 00:21:19.950
be really interested in watching that.

00:21:20.030 --> 00:21:26.030
And I wonder if um one of the arguments for why we have episodic representations, it's

00:21:26.030 --> 00:21:30.430
sort of like a picture's worth a thousand words, is that there's there's a lot of

00:21:30.430 --> 00:21:36.120
information, and there's also information that uh you may not already, you, I mean, we just

00:21:36.120 --> 00:21:40.600
use this colloquially, but like that you may not know what lesson to draw from this

00:21:40.600 --> 00:21:41.160
episode.

00:21:41.320 --> 00:21:46.280
So the most economical thing to do in terms of a evolved representation is store the

00:21:46.280 --> 00:21:47.000
episode.

00:21:47.160 --> 00:21:52.440
And it's the fact that it's related to this high fitness cost thing and it's stored as an

00:21:52.440 --> 00:21:58.350
episode that there's sort of constant machinery running to sort of extract what is

00:21:58.350 --> 00:22:02.590
the inference, and with with with varying levels of certainty or uncertainty.

00:22:02.750 --> 00:22:08.430
And so maybe, and maybe it's no accident that we're really drawn to stories and episodic

00:22:08.430 --> 00:22:08.990
formats.

00:22:09.150 --> 00:22:12.110
And it's in fact that the lesson isn't super clear.

00:22:12.350 --> 00:22:15.950
And maybe if the lesson is too clear, it actually isn't that interesting.

00:22:16.030 --> 00:22:21.480
And part of what counts as interesting is it's this uh really kind of Goldilocks

00:22:21.720 --> 00:22:27.400
middle ground of it's there's enough content in specifics to possibly

00:22:27.400 --> 00:22:28.760
extract something.

00:22:29.080 --> 00:22:34.920
But at the same time, it's not super clear what the bottom line thing is, you know, where

00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:38.760
if it's sort of super obvious, I don't know if there's been research on this, but that that

00:22:38.760 --> 00:22:44.250
seemed to be like maybe uh sort of an alien's perspective of like what's the middle ground

00:22:44.330 --> 00:22:49.290
sort of sweet spot in terms of um what makes something quote unquote interesting.

00:22:49.610 --> 00:22:49.850
Yeah.

00:22:49.930 --> 00:22:55.050
And I think you know, you hear this a lot from there's kind of this meme online of you

00:22:55.050 --> 00:22:56.090
know, horror fans.

00:22:56.250 --> 00:22:58.890
And it often it's like with you'll see the meme with like women.

00:22:58.970 --> 00:23:02.090
It's like, oh, a lot of women will turn on true crime to relax at night, right?

00:23:02.170 --> 00:23:07.500
That's turn on stories of mostly men killing mostly women to relax at night.

00:23:07.660 --> 00:23:10.140
And I have I've had a lot of people ask me, like, how could that be?

00:23:10.220 --> 00:23:12.460
Like, why, you know, why would you do that?

00:23:12.700 --> 00:23:17.420
Um, and I don't have an empirical answer for it, but I have maybe like uh an intuition

00:23:17.420 --> 00:23:21.100
about what it might be, which is that if you watch a lot of, let's say, true crime in

00:23:21.100 --> 00:23:25.420
particular, because there tend to be um similarities between cases, right?

00:23:25.580 --> 00:23:27.580
And in true crime, people do pay attention to those.

00:23:27.660 --> 00:23:33.650
There is evidence that people find most interesting pieces of the story that

00:23:33.650 --> 00:23:35.890
tell you like how someone got away or how they didn't.

00:23:35.970 --> 00:23:39.810
Like those are the most, there's some really cool manipulation studies so those are the

00:23:39.810 --> 00:23:41.970
most interesting parts of the story to most people.

00:23:42.290 --> 00:23:46.450
Um and I think what happens probably is that if you watch a lot of those, you get really

00:23:46.450 --> 00:23:51.810
good at guessing who the bad guy is, why he did it, what the victim um should have seen

00:23:51.810 --> 00:23:52.770
that they didn't.

00:23:52.930 --> 00:23:57.740
Um and that can be really comforting to know that uh you're guessing all these things

00:23:57.740 --> 00:23:58.460
correctly, right?

00:23:58.540 --> 00:24:04.300
That can actually probably be relaxing, even if the material itself is horrible or

00:24:04.300 --> 00:24:06.540
dangerous or violent or whatever, threatening.

00:24:06.700 --> 00:24:11.020
Um, if you're just guessing it accurately, like bam, bam, bam, one after the another, one

00:24:11.020 --> 00:24:14.140
after another, it's gonna feel a little bit relaxing.

00:24:14.220 --> 00:24:15.180
Like, why do you have to worry?

00:24:15.260 --> 00:24:16.060
You already know this, right?

00:24:16.140 --> 00:24:18.780
It's like it's like affirmation that you're prepared almost.

00:24:19.180 --> 00:24:20.140
And I think you do get that.

00:24:20.300 --> 00:24:23.550
You get that with like people who've watched a lot of horror movies too, and you, you know,

00:24:23.630 --> 00:24:26.590
they kind of can guess what's going on, which horror movies are not, most of them are not

00:24:26.590 --> 00:24:30.430
known for being particularly complex about like what you should do and shouldn't do.

00:24:30.590 --> 00:24:33.310
Um, and it can get kind of relaxing to and almost comedic.

00:24:33.390 --> 00:24:38.830
You can kind of then lean into the comedic side of things without it feeling um too taboo,

00:24:38.910 --> 00:24:41.870
you know, because it's like, oh, well, of course that teenager died, they shouldn't have

00:24:41.870 --> 00:24:42.990
been doing that, right?

00:24:43.230 --> 00:24:48.270
Um, and you you get this kind of lax approach to to danger.

00:24:48.430 --> 00:24:53.230
And uh yeah, I think it can then become more of a thing you turn on before you go to bed.

00:24:53.800 --> 00:24:59.640
So counterintuitively, it's that you I think we have this counter this kind of cartoonish

00:24:59.720 --> 00:25:03.880
um view of things where, you know, bad stimuli equal fear.

00:25:04.040 --> 00:25:04.200
Right.

00:25:04.440 --> 00:25:09.320
But it sounds like what you're saying is that in fact, fear, and I think people have made

00:25:09.320 --> 00:25:15.080
this argument before too, is that, or at least anecdotally, um, that fear is sort of a

00:25:15.080 --> 00:25:16.920
system for capturing more information.

00:25:17.000 --> 00:25:20.550
It's a symptom that you haven't done your homework, basically.

00:25:20.790 --> 00:25:26.310
And that, and I've heard this from people who do like rock climbing or really

00:25:26.550 --> 00:25:32.070
high stakes, life and death things, that if you actually practice and

00:25:32.070 --> 00:25:37.990
learn enough that there's still a notion of sort of

00:25:37.990 --> 00:25:41.110
how risky something is, but the fear sort of goes away.

00:25:41.270 --> 00:25:45.750
And it's so this idea is that counterintuitively, it sounds like what you're saying is by

00:25:45.750 --> 00:25:50.660
exposing yourself to these concerns, it might actually make the fear less.

00:25:51.060 --> 00:25:53.460
Or your confidence goes up and that counteracts it.

00:25:53.620 --> 00:25:53.940
Right.

00:25:54.180 --> 00:25:58.260
Um, and you know, we can talk about this now or later, but I've I've I've then taken that

00:25:58.260 --> 00:26:02.580
exact sort of premise and then expanded this into well, then can you use horror to help you

00:26:02.580 --> 00:26:05.860
not feel so anxious or to give you tools to overcome anxiety?

00:26:06.020 --> 00:26:06.340
Right.

00:26:06.740 --> 00:26:11.060
Um and not not horror, not that horror is necessarily uniquely suited to that, though I do

00:26:11.060 --> 00:26:15.410
think it does have some benefits, certainly, over other entertainment genres.

00:26:15.650 --> 00:26:20.210
Um, but yeah, I think that you can take that exact premise and then say, okay, well, then

00:26:20.210 --> 00:26:24.930
maybe we can sort of leverage scary stories to help us in some ways.

00:26:25.250 --> 00:26:25.890
Right.

00:26:26.930 --> 00:26:32.850
I mean, how what do you see the so we obviously know that, or we're the the hypothesis

00:26:32.850 --> 00:26:36.530
is that this it's helping us learn about dangerous things so that we could be better

00:26:36.530 --> 00:26:39.490
prepared for dealing with them, so that we could better avoid them.

00:26:39.620 --> 00:26:44.020
Um and it's not obvious in advance what types of information, what details are going to be

00:26:44.020 --> 00:26:45.540
important when it comes to a dangerous thing.

00:26:45.620 --> 00:26:50.180
So if you're if you if you see a lion uh versus a tiger, you know, knowing that tigers are

00:26:50.180 --> 00:26:55.700
stripes are striped and lions aren't, um, that information, it's a it might seem like an

00:26:55.700 --> 00:26:59.140
irrelevant detail, but it could save your life in some situations.

00:26:59.300 --> 00:27:03.490
Knowing that uh the different habits of of of the two different types of animals, where

00:27:03.490 --> 00:27:07.970
they like to congregate, whether they like to stalk their prey or whether they just kind of

00:27:08.050 --> 00:27:09.970
you know gallivant out in the open.

00:27:10.130 --> 00:27:14.610
These each each one of these these subtle details could be a detail that that means the

00:27:14.610 --> 00:27:15.730
difference between life or death.

00:27:15.970 --> 00:27:17.250
Yeah David, can I interject?

00:27:17.330 --> 00:27:21.810
So never swim away this is just a PSA, never like panic and swim away from a great white

00:27:21.810 --> 00:27:22.210
shark.

00:27:22.370 --> 00:27:25.720
We we haven't talked about the asymmetric or of attrition, but they're asymmetric or of

00:27:25.720 --> 00:27:29.880
attrition creatures where if you don't act like prey, you just stand your ground, look at

00:27:29.880 --> 00:27:31.480
them, and stay stay facing them.

00:27:31.640 --> 00:27:35.480
If you ever see one in the water, you're more than likely going to be okay.

00:27:35.720 --> 00:27:36.920
You're bigger than their prey.

00:27:37.320 --> 00:27:40.040
So it's exactly like a bear or a mountain lion.

00:27:40.200 --> 00:27:43.160
Never run away, never to do like never splash away.

00:27:43.240 --> 00:27:44.280
Don't freak out.

00:27:44.520 --> 00:27:50.210
That can be the difference between like activating this creature's like predation response

00:27:50.210 --> 00:27:54.850
versus it like, well, you're pretty big, you seem comfortable, I'm not gonna go after you.

00:27:55.010 --> 00:27:56.450
So exactly, yes.

00:27:56.530 --> 00:28:01.810
Like I'm not to just like to call back, like I'm not afraid of going in the water as much

00:28:01.810 --> 00:28:02.770
now, now that I know that.

00:28:02.850 --> 00:28:06.610
But that David, that's a perfect example of like I didn't know that before I moved to Santa

00:28:06.610 --> 00:28:08.370
Barbara and I did a deep dive into it.

00:28:08.530 --> 00:28:10.450
I'm not curious about great white sharks anymore.

00:28:10.530 --> 00:28:12.850
But that would be an example, David, of what you're talking about.

00:28:13.300 --> 00:28:16.740
Yeah, and there's there's a whole lot of directions I can go from that because that ties

00:28:16.740 --> 00:28:21.140
into like everything that I am working on now, and also that I've worked on in the past

00:28:21.220 --> 00:28:23.380
with like formidability assessments.

00:28:23.460 --> 00:28:28.020
And you know, I have this again, this project I've been working on with with Edgar, uh,

00:28:28.180 --> 00:28:32.260
trying to define the horror genre almost using an evolutionary perspective, and kind of

00:28:32.260 --> 00:28:36.660
what we landed on, and we tested this empirically in a in a lot of different ways, is that

00:28:36.910 --> 00:28:41.150
you know, fear in the case of these stories, and probably in the case of many things, has

00:28:41.150 --> 00:28:44.030
to do with relative formidability asymmetries.

00:28:44.190 --> 00:28:50.110
Um, so that just such that if you um either yourself or if you're

00:28:50.110 --> 00:28:55.870
empathizing with, for example, a protagonist who is more vulnerable, less formidable

00:28:56.030 --> 00:28:58.670
than the antagonist, it's gonna produce fear, right?

00:28:58.750 --> 00:29:02.590
Like that's the thing that should produce fear, especially if that antagonist is and and

00:29:02.750 --> 00:29:05.380
maybe only if an antagonist is malicious, right?

00:29:05.460 --> 00:29:08.580
And if they're around you, near you, pursuing you.

00:29:08.820 --> 00:29:14.660
Um, and we find that that the like that's kind of a unique narrative structure in

00:29:14.660 --> 00:29:20.660
horror um that reliably elicits everything from like higher

00:29:20.660 --> 00:29:25.700
chance of the word fear being included in the description to uh higher heart rates when

00:29:25.700 --> 00:29:26.900
you're watching the film.

00:29:27.150 --> 00:29:32.430
Um, so I think that's it's probably some of the input conditions, I guess, that like fear

00:29:32.590 --> 00:29:37.390
generally takes is how how vulnerable am I to this thing, right?

00:29:37.630 --> 00:29:38.510
Is it near me?

00:29:38.670 --> 00:29:39.390
Is it bigger than me?

00:29:39.470 --> 00:29:40.350
Is it stronger than me?

00:29:40.510 --> 00:29:42.030
Uh, does it have more resources than me?

00:29:42.190 --> 00:29:44.030
Can it outcompete me, essentially?

00:29:44.190 --> 00:29:49.950
So you can think of vulnerability kind of as a like a uh a fe a

00:29:49.950 --> 00:29:55.470
felt um appraisal of being less formidable in an asymmetric contest.

00:29:55.790 --> 00:29:56.350
Hmm.

00:29:56.780 --> 00:30:02.540
What what you're saying suggests that there could be a Darwinian advantage to

00:30:02.700 --> 00:30:04.380
mastering your fear.

00:30:04.620 --> 00:30:10.540
So if uh if predators, either uh actual predators or social predators, um use

00:30:10.540 --> 00:30:16.380
your fear as a cue uh of the the problem ability and yeah,

00:30:16.460 --> 00:30:17.260
and you'll defer.

00:30:17.580 --> 00:30:18.470
And you'll defer to me.

00:30:18.550 --> 00:30:20.070
You're lower, you're less formidable to me.

00:30:20.150 --> 00:30:22.550
If you're afraid of me, that's a good sign that I should attack you.

00:30:22.870 --> 00:30:23.110
Right.

00:30:23.270 --> 00:30:23.430
Yeah.

00:30:23.670 --> 00:30:27.670
Uh, but if you're not afraid, then that suggests to me that you know something I don't.

00:30:27.830 --> 00:30:32.230
You might be harder to attack than I than I think, and I might leave you alone.

00:30:32.470 --> 00:30:36.150
And so it could it could suggest that if you know if you have learned a lot about a

00:30:36.150 --> 00:30:41.670
dangerous stimulus uh and you are signaling that you're not afraid, then that could uh

00:30:41.670 --> 00:30:43.750
reduce your chances of actually being harmed.

00:30:43.910 --> 00:30:47.960
On the other hand, if you if you signal that you're very afraid, uh that could uh actually

00:30:47.960 --> 00:30:51.160
increase the chances uh that the danger will will actually manifest.

00:30:51.800 --> 00:30:53.160
Would you do you buy that logic?

00:30:53.560 --> 00:30:59.000
I I think yeah absolutely I mean that's like I think a very uh coherent way of putting a

00:30:59.000 --> 00:31:03.320
lot of the things that I've uh thought about in relation to this and like you know again I

00:31:03.320 --> 00:31:09.080
think you identified probably something that uh like an insight that can be applied broadly

00:31:09.160 --> 00:31:15.110
you know to everything from business negotiate negotiations to clinical anxiety, right?

00:31:15.430 --> 00:31:21.030
Um, this idea that uh and we talk about it all the time in in colloquial terms, right?

00:31:21.110 --> 00:31:22.310
It's just confidence, right?

00:31:22.390 --> 00:31:27.670
It's just your your confidence um and not mistaking confidence for competence uh on your

00:31:27.670 --> 00:31:28.070
own, right?

00:31:28.230 --> 00:31:32.390
Like understanding where your position is, but maybe putting forward a fit, your best foot

00:31:32.390 --> 00:31:35.190
forward, or you know, we have all kinds of sayings for these kinds of things.

00:31:35.270 --> 00:31:36.950
Uh, but I think that's exactly right.

00:31:37.110 --> 00:31:39.960
Um, if that's true, then those things should also be true.

00:31:40.120 --> 00:31:44.280
And I don't have empirical evidence that those things are true, but uh I'm also not looked

00:31:44.280 --> 00:31:47.720
into the literature for things like again, negotiations probably is where that would be a

00:31:47.720 --> 00:31:53.400
huge um or politics, even political negotiations, wartime negotiations, you know, probably

00:31:53.400 --> 00:31:55.800
huge uh implications like that.

00:31:55.880 --> 00:31:58.280
That insight had probably a huge implications for that kind of thing.

00:31:58.590 --> 00:31:58.830
Yeah.

00:31:58.910 --> 00:32:02.830
I mean, it would be fascinating to test that empirically, to just have, you know, the

00:32:02.830 --> 00:32:07.070
person you're negotiating with or you're playing a an economic game with have them look

00:32:07.070 --> 00:32:11.390
afraid, have a fear face versus have them not have a fear face and see how that changes

00:32:11.390 --> 00:32:14.990
people's behavior, have people rate their their physical formidability, their social

00:32:14.990 --> 00:32:15.790
formidability.

00:32:15.870 --> 00:32:20.110
You know, does the fear face uh change those inferences and those perceptions?

00:32:20.190 --> 00:32:21.710
It would be fascinating to look at.

00:32:21.870 --> 00:32:27.100
Uh just an one example of how richly predictive uh this this perspective is.

00:32:28.860 --> 00:32:29.260
Uh well.

00:32:30.140 --> 00:32:34.860
I did a study with uh with Dan Fessler a few years ago that was not originally it didn't

00:32:34.860 --> 00:32:35.580
originate from this work.

00:32:35.660 --> 00:32:36.780
I did a morbid curiosity.

00:32:36.860 --> 00:32:38.460
It was kind of a separate question in some ways.

00:32:38.540 --> 00:32:42.620
But now that I've started doing this, I see that you know, maybe subconsciously it was kind

00:32:42.620 --> 00:32:46.140
of related to these things, or maybe I've just tied it to it after the fact.

00:32:46.220 --> 00:32:49.910
But it was a study showing that I I had this question of like, why are humans sometimes

00:32:49.910 --> 00:32:51.110
gruesomely violent?

00:32:51.270 --> 00:32:55.350
You know, like there's no reason you got to pull someone's entrails out and uh display

00:32:55.350 --> 00:32:55.990
them, right?

00:32:56.310 --> 00:33:00.070
Um you've already killed someone, you've you've you've defeated the enemy, you've the the

00:33:00.070 --> 00:33:01.030
threat is eliminated.

00:33:01.110 --> 00:33:02.870
So why are we sometimes gruesomely violent?

00:33:03.030 --> 00:33:05.270
And the kind of simple answer to that is that we're signaling something.

00:33:05.350 --> 00:33:07.590
But the question then is like, well, what are we signaling?

00:33:07.750 --> 00:33:08.230
Right.

00:33:08.470 --> 00:33:12.780
Um, and it seems to be the case that we ran this on different vignettes that were like

00:33:12.780 --> 00:33:16.700
very, very precisely controlled and only had like minor tweaks to the wording, you know, to

00:33:16.700 --> 00:33:18.220
kind of change the conditions.

00:33:18.380 --> 00:33:23.260
Uh, it seems to be that you're signaling your formidability because uh people perceive

00:33:23.260 --> 00:33:25.740
gruesome actors to be larger, stronger.

00:33:25.820 --> 00:33:28.300
If you ask them to envision, like how big is this person?

00:33:28.540 --> 00:33:30.940
How strong is this person, how tall is this person, even?

00:33:31.020 --> 00:33:34.950
They imagine people who are gruesomely violent, who commit the same act of violence, but

00:33:34.950 --> 00:33:38.390
then just take it a little step further, you know, by doing something gross, basically.

00:33:38.470 --> 00:33:41.030
Uh, they imagine them to be bigger, stronger.

00:33:41.110 --> 00:33:43.590
And of course, that then impacts negotiations.

00:33:43.670 --> 00:33:47.670
And so that could give insight to like, why do certain terrorist groups behave in certain

00:33:47.670 --> 00:33:51.110
kinds of ways and send videos of these like horrible acts, right?

00:33:51.270 --> 00:33:56.310
Uh, why did the state for hundreds of years do public executions in front of everyone,

00:33:56.390 --> 00:33:56.630
right?

00:33:56.710 --> 00:34:00.470
These like gruesome executions that they could have done behind closed doors, but they did

00:34:00.470 --> 00:34:06.060
them in a way that uh everyone could see, and interestingly, that everyone wanted to see.

00:34:06.300 --> 00:34:11.980
Um so I think that yeah, there's um we we're trying I think you can uh

00:34:12.140 --> 00:34:14.700
again, it just extends to so many different ways.

00:34:14.780 --> 00:34:19.180
This this idea that fear is intrinsically tied to formidability.

00:34:20.140 --> 00:34:26.090
So that that's a good segue into the question of how would you define the horror genre?

00:34:26.250 --> 00:34:29.210
So a lot of people have thought about what horror is.

00:34:29.530 --> 00:34:35.050
Do you have a way of defining it that you think fits with your theoretical

00:34:35.050 --> 00:34:39.290
perspective that sheds light on how we can categorize something as a horror movie versus a

00:34:39.290 --> 00:34:42.410
thriller versus you know an action movie versus something else?

00:34:42.730 --> 00:34:43.210
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:43.370 --> 00:34:48.090
Actually, you know, working on this question helped me think about fear better because if

00:34:48.090 --> 00:34:52.780
you think about what a horror movie, I think everyone agrees, like, and even me to some

00:34:52.780 --> 00:34:57.420
extent agrees, like, okay, one definition of a horror film is a film that scares you.

00:34:57.660 --> 00:35:01.020
I don't think that's a great definition because it may not scare me, it might scare you,

00:35:01.260 --> 00:35:02.540
might not scare Dave.

00:35:02.780 --> 00:35:07.020
Um, a better definition might be it's a film that is intended to scare you.

00:35:07.180 --> 00:35:11.660
Like, okay, that's kind of hard to disprove, but that's that's a decent definition, right?

00:35:11.900 --> 00:35:13.850
But then the question is, well, why does it scare you?

00:35:13.930 --> 00:35:14.010
Right.

00:35:14.090 --> 00:35:16.570
That doesn't really tell me anything about the structure of the horror film.

00:35:16.650 --> 00:35:20.010
It just says that it's meant to scare you or that it does scare you.

00:35:20.250 --> 00:35:22.890
And so I wasn't very satisfied with that definition.

00:35:22.970 --> 00:35:26.810
And I thought, surely there must be something, you know, we we all seem to, you know, I

00:35:26.810 --> 00:35:32.650
would say with like 80%, just this is just an intuition, but like, you know, roughly 80%

00:35:32.890 --> 00:35:36.700
of people would probably agree that X movie is a horror movie or Y movie is a horror movie,

00:35:36.780 --> 00:35:36.940
right?

00:35:37.020 --> 00:35:39.820
There's like when we see a horror movie, we kind of know it, like, oh, that's kind of a

00:35:39.820 --> 00:35:40.780
horror movie, right?

00:35:41.020 --> 00:35:44.860
Um, so there must be something that we're we're latching onto that's not just fear, but

00:35:44.860 --> 00:35:48.540
some components that do produce fear in some people in certain circumstances.

00:35:48.700 --> 00:35:53.740
Um, so what I landed on is similar to what we just talked about, which is uh a horror movie

00:35:53.740 --> 00:35:59.590
or horror story, a horror narrative, is one in which you have a protagonist who is uh

00:35:59.830 --> 00:36:02.550
much less formidable than a malicious antagonist.

00:36:02.710 --> 00:36:04.310
And you don't see that in any other genre.

00:36:04.390 --> 00:36:05.590
You don't see it in action movies.

00:36:05.750 --> 00:36:10.550
And action and again, we have empirical evidence for this, uh, Edgar and I do that uh we

00:36:10.550 --> 00:36:14.950
use that huge Facebook data set that has like three and a half million people and uh has

00:36:14.950 --> 00:36:17.110
their personality traits, their big five and everything.

00:36:17.270 --> 00:36:22.950
And we looked at like 700 different movies and rated them on this like very precise formula

00:36:23.110 --> 00:36:27.200
for if they were, you know, how how formidable the antagonist was, how formidable the

00:36:27.200 --> 00:36:28.400
protagonist was.

00:36:28.560 --> 00:36:33.840
Um, and what you find is that in horror movies, you have high formidability antagonist, low

00:36:33.840 --> 00:36:35.440
formidability protagonist.

00:36:35.600 --> 00:36:41.120
In action movies and thrillers, you have both moderately sort of equally matched, uh,

00:36:41.360 --> 00:36:44.960
moderately high formidability protagonists and antagonist, which makes sense.

00:36:45.040 --> 00:36:48.080
Thrillers are kind of a cat and mouse game where you're chasing each other back and forth.

00:36:48.320 --> 00:36:54.210
Action movies are more of a face to face um type of story where the hero and the villain

00:36:54.210 --> 00:36:55.410
are kind of equally matched, right?

00:36:55.490 --> 00:36:58.050
And that's what generates the action or the violence.

00:36:58.450 --> 00:37:01.170
And then of course you have sci-fi and fantasy.

00:37:01.250 --> 00:37:02.450
Those are a bit lower.

00:37:03.650 --> 00:37:08.450
The tricky part comes when you know you get what about sci-fi horror, like the movie Alien?

00:37:08.850 --> 00:37:14.770
Well, there's uh some evidence that uh when when horror when when films take on two genres

00:37:14.850 --> 00:37:19.440
and one of those is the horror genre, they tend to like lean into that aspect of it.

00:37:19.600 --> 00:37:24.720
So if it's a horror sci-fi, it tends to be a horror movie with sci-fi elements or a horror

00:37:24.720 --> 00:37:26.640
movie with fantasy elements.

00:37:26.800 --> 00:37:31.680
Um, and so again, I think the thing that they're probably leaning on is strong uh

00:37:31.680 --> 00:37:34.640
antagonist, relatively weaker protagonist.

00:37:34.960 --> 00:37:38.720
And what's interesting is that, and the reason that I started thinking about them this way

00:37:38.720 --> 00:37:42.560
is that pretty much maps onto a prey animal's experience in the wild.

00:37:42.770 --> 00:37:45.890
Predators are almost always, certainly mammalian predators.

00:37:46.050 --> 00:37:51.250
Less true in some cases if you use venom or other things, but um I think you could make an

00:37:51.250 --> 00:37:53.650
argument that venom increases your formidability.

00:37:53.810 --> 00:37:59.810
But uh it's certainly true that for most prey mammals, uh, their predator is larger,

00:37:59.970 --> 00:38:04.450
stronger, faster, more formidable generally, has better weaponry.

00:38:04.610 --> 00:38:10.280
Um, and of course, there's an arms race where the prey animal typically um, in like

00:38:10.280 --> 00:38:14.040
95% of cases, gets faster or better at hiding.

00:38:14.120 --> 00:38:15.080
So it's better at escaping.

00:38:15.160 --> 00:38:19.160
It never confronts, you don't see, you don't often see gazelles unless they're trapped, you

00:38:19.160 --> 00:38:23.080
know, confront a cheetah or a zebra, confront a lion, unless they're truly trapped.

00:38:23.160 --> 00:38:25.240
And that's exactly what you find in horror movies.

00:38:25.400 --> 00:38:30.520
The protagonist always is fleeing until they get trapped, and then they usually get lucky,

00:38:30.600 --> 00:38:34.920
or they maybe find some weakness that they didn't see before, sort of a David and Goliath

00:38:35.080 --> 00:38:35.880
kind of thing.

00:38:36.120 --> 00:38:40.010
Um but typically they're running away until they're trapped.

00:38:40.090 --> 00:38:44.410
And that that like to me, that just jumped out as like, well, that's just predator prey

00:38:44.410 --> 00:38:45.290
interactions.

00:38:45.930 --> 00:38:46.330
Yeah.

00:38:46.570 --> 00:38:51.930
My one my favorite movie uh that I've watched more times than any other movie is uh is the

00:38:51.930 --> 00:38:53.690
original Jurassic Park movie.

00:38:53.770 --> 00:38:55.290
It's just like a beautiful movie.

00:38:55.450 --> 00:38:59.290
And I love about that that I don't think of that as a canonical horror movie, but it really

00:38:59.290 --> 00:39:04.840
is in this sense of it's this thing of it's beautiful, it's uh you know, it's it's all the

00:39:04.840 --> 00:39:08.680
kind of like, well, there's this incredible thing that like dinosaurs finally exist.

00:39:08.760 --> 00:39:13.240
And I mean, for me, it was like I was a boy, I had never seen a real life dinosaur till I

00:39:13.240 --> 00:39:13.480
saw this.

00:39:13.720 --> 00:39:14.360
It was like perfect.

00:39:14.440 --> 00:39:15.880
I was just like, mwah, like so.

00:39:15.960 --> 00:39:17.320
It was just perfect timing for me.

00:39:17.480 --> 00:39:22.120
But um, but yeah, no, this thing of like there's this thing, it seems better than you could

00:39:22.120 --> 00:39:23.960
imagine, and it turns out to be a horror.

00:39:24.040 --> 00:39:27.560
I just that's such a wonderful sort of uh uh arc.

00:39:27.640 --> 00:39:31.990
I think it's like one of the most perfect movies, and it is it's among other genres a

00:39:31.990 --> 00:39:33.030
horror movie for sure.

00:39:33.190 --> 00:39:33.350
Yeah.

00:39:33.750 --> 00:39:33.910
Yeah.

00:39:33.990 --> 00:39:37.510
Well, and one of the, you know, for this formula we created to measure this thing, we

00:39:37.510 --> 00:39:39.830
called it the protagonist vulnerability index.

00:39:39.990 --> 00:39:41.990
So basically, how vulnerable is the protagonist?

00:39:42.150 --> 00:39:46.950
In the case of Jurassic Park, you have an incredibly vulnerable or an incredibly formidable

00:39:46.950 --> 00:39:48.870
antagonist in like, let's say, the T-Rex.

00:39:49.670 --> 00:39:53.990
But uh one of the variables in our formula is threat presence.

00:39:54.150 --> 00:39:59.680
So how for what percentage of the narrative is the antagonist uh actively chasing or a

00:39:59.680 --> 00:40:00.480
danger to the protagonist?

00:40:00.640 --> 00:40:03.200
Well, in Jurassic Park, they're behind a fence for a long time.

00:40:03.280 --> 00:40:04.240
So it doesn't matter.

00:40:04.400 --> 00:40:10.000
It's not just high formidability that triggers fear, it's an asymmetry and formidability,

00:40:10.080 --> 00:40:10.160
right?

00:40:10.240 --> 00:40:16.160
And part of that calculation is is that highly formidable antagonist pursuing

00:40:16.160 --> 00:40:16.320
you?

00:40:16.480 --> 00:40:20.480
Or are they in a place where they can pursue you?

00:40:20.630 --> 00:40:23.030
And for the first part of Jurassic Park, they're not, right?

00:40:23.110 --> 00:40:23.910
They're things we can look at.

00:40:23.990 --> 00:40:26.630
It's the same reason we go to a zoo and we'll look at a lion.

00:40:26.710 --> 00:40:30.870
But if I ask you if you want to get in the lion pit, most people should say no, right?

00:40:31.110 --> 00:40:36.870
Um, so I think yeah, there's this contextual difference of like uh a dangerous thing is

00:40:36.870 --> 00:40:40.550
only dangerous if it can get you, you know, which is kind of an obvious statement, but it's

00:40:40.550 --> 00:40:44.630
really important when it comes to these like definitions of these kinds of things, I guess.

00:40:44.790 --> 00:40:45.350
Yeah.

00:40:45.670 --> 00:40:50.620
I will say that um when I when I was reading about your way of defining horror, um it

00:40:50.620 --> 00:40:55.180
helped me reconceptualize uh one of my favorite movies, which is uh Terminator two Judgment

00:40:55.260 --> 00:40:55.420
Day.

00:40:55.580 --> 00:40:58.540
Yeah, clear uh and uh so one wonderful movie.

00:40:58.620 --> 00:41:03.180
Uh and uh I had always thought of it as an action movie and as like the greatest action

00:41:03.180 --> 00:41:04.060
movie of all time.

00:41:04.220 --> 00:41:04.540
Right.

00:41:04.620 --> 00:41:09.670
But a r after reading your your thing about uh horror, it made me realize that actually

00:41:09.670 --> 00:41:12.710
Terminator 2 is better conceptualized as a horror movie.

00:41:12.870 --> 00:41:17.910
Because if you think about it, the antagonist is a more advanced uh Terminator model.

00:41:18.550 --> 00:41:24.390
And uh and he's chasing a a less advanced Terminator model who is way, you know, way

00:41:24.390 --> 00:41:25.430
less formidable.

00:41:25.670 --> 00:41:31.110
Um and and most of the movie is just involves this like incredibly sophisticated, like m

00:41:31.190 --> 00:41:35.840
liquid metal, shape-shifting antagonist that's way more formidable than Arnold

00:41:35.840 --> 00:41:38.560
Schwarzenegger and is just chasing them for most of the movie.

00:41:38.720 --> 00:41:41.840
And so really, when you when you think about it in those terms, uh it's better

00:41:41.840 --> 00:41:43.440
conceptualized as a horror movie.

00:41:43.520 --> 00:41:48.160
And like the antagonist is really scary to have this metallic shapeshifter who can take the

00:41:48.160 --> 00:41:51.040
form of anyone, like that's that's a really powerful ability.

00:41:51.200 --> 00:41:54.960
And like ev like there's so many moments of the movie where you think he's dead and he just

00:41:55.170 --> 00:41:56.050
he just gets up again.

00:41:56.130 --> 00:41:57.170
He's just like invincible.

00:41:57.490 --> 00:42:01.490
You can shoot him and it just goes right through him and he just like melds back into

00:42:01.490 --> 00:42:01.810
shape.

00:42:01.970 --> 00:42:05.890
You know, he blows up and he survives like it's it's it really is a horror movie.

00:42:06.050 --> 00:42:09.890
Um and so that was a pretty cool realization to me.

00:42:10.370 --> 00:42:13.090
Yeah and it shows up you know it shows up in our data set like that.

00:42:13.250 --> 00:42:15.570
It shows up as it's like right at the cusp.

00:42:15.650 --> 00:42:18.370
It's like it's like a at the low end of the horror movies.

00:42:18.450 --> 00:42:22.050
And we didn't have you know any reason to have a specific cutoff because it gives you a

00:42:22.050 --> 00:42:25.560
number right this formula gives you like any not formula, gives you a number at the end,

00:42:25.720 --> 00:42:25.960
right?

00:42:26.120 --> 00:42:27.800
Um, and there's kind of a gradient.

00:42:27.880 --> 00:42:33.800
And if you, you know, have a big Excel sheet and you've got like uh IMDB rated genres on

00:42:33.800 --> 00:42:37.960
this column and PDI or protagonist vulnerability addicts on this column, you'll see that

00:42:37.960 --> 00:42:40.120
the first like hundred are just horror, horror, horror, horror.

00:42:40.200 --> 00:42:44.200
And then you get the like horror sci-fi mixes, horror fantasy mixes, and then you get into

00:42:44.200 --> 00:42:46.360
like horror action and horror thriller.

00:42:46.680 --> 00:42:51.390
And uh Predator was like ranked right with like the bottom part of the horror movies, which

00:42:51.470 --> 00:42:53.550
which intuitively again makes sense when you watch the movie.

00:42:53.630 --> 00:42:55.630
You're like, man, this is a little scary in some ways, right?

00:42:55.710 --> 00:42:58.190
Like it's kind of that's kind of a scary story.

00:42:58.430 --> 00:43:00.190
Um, there were a few others like that too.

00:43:00.350 --> 00:43:06.350
And uh like the movie Predator, which uh obviously, if you've seen it, is um about

00:43:06.350 --> 00:43:11.230
this alien creature that preys upon or hunts for sport humans, right?

00:43:11.390 --> 00:43:16.480
And the reason that's that it's not rated higher or the reason also that it doesn't feel as

00:43:16.480 --> 00:43:21.680
scary, I think, as some other horror movies, despite that, is that it's a predator who's

00:43:21.680 --> 00:43:26.160
trying to find the top prey, the best prey it can, the most formidable prey it can, which

00:43:26.160 --> 00:43:31.760
is like typically these elite group of military uh a military troop that's like an elite

00:43:31.760 --> 00:43:33.200
group, like the Green Berets or something.

00:43:33.600 --> 00:43:35.040
It's a predator with principles, right?

00:43:35.520 --> 00:43:36.960
It's a predator with principles.

00:43:37.280 --> 00:43:40.430
It's a fair fighting yeah, it's a fair fighting predator.

00:43:40.510 --> 00:43:41.790
Um, but that's what it's looking for.

00:43:41.870 --> 00:43:45.710
It's like the what's that uh old uh it's the most dangerous game, like where you're

00:43:45.710 --> 00:43:45.870
hunting.

00:43:46.030 --> 00:43:50.670
Oh yeah, you know, it's similar to that where it's like you are, you know, the the

00:43:50.670 --> 00:43:54.910
antagonist is more powerful they are, they have better weaponry, they're faster, more

00:43:54.910 --> 00:43:57.470
elusive, but they're outnumbered.

00:43:57.630 --> 00:43:59.550
They're facing a group of things, right?

00:43:59.630 --> 00:44:04.270
And and there's good evidence that alliances increase not just obviously like how strong

00:44:04.270 --> 00:44:06.510
you are, but also how strong you're perceived to be.

00:44:06.750 --> 00:44:11.640
Um and they're like when it comes to humans, like kind of the top humans, like highly

00:44:11.640 --> 00:44:15.080
trained humans with weapons, with things that increase their formidability.

00:44:15.240 --> 00:44:19.240
Um, and so that makes it feel kind of like an action movie too, similar with with

00:44:19.240 --> 00:44:20.920
Terminator, uh, to some extent.

00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:25.400
But I would say Predators is an even better example of man, this feels like an action

00:44:25.400 --> 00:44:29.400
movie, but it feels like it should be a horror movie because this is a really big, bad guy

00:44:29.480 --> 00:44:31.400
who's literally he is a predator, right?

00:44:31.480 --> 00:44:32.200
That's the name of the movie.

00:44:32.280 --> 00:44:33.560
Why is this not a horror movie?

00:44:33.720 --> 00:44:38.950
Uh and the answer is: well, he's fighting people who are at least when they're grouped

00:44:38.950 --> 00:44:41.510
together, pretty formidable to him, right?

00:44:41.910 --> 00:44:45.590
If he was if he was uh if he was hunting a cheerleading squad, it would be um.

00:44:46.070 --> 00:44:47.110
If he was hunting the summer camp.

00:44:47.270 --> 00:44:51.190
If you if you put him if you put him at uh Camp Crystal Lake, put him at uh you know a teen

00:44:51.190 --> 00:44:52.470
summer camp, it becomes a horror movie.

00:44:53.190 --> 00:44:53.350
Yeah.

00:44:53.670 --> 00:44:53.830
Yeah.

00:44:54.230 --> 00:45:00.160
David's like, I'm gonna what's the term for uh writing the screenplay and uh green what

00:45:00.480 --> 00:45:02.160
what's the LA lingo for that?

00:45:02.480 --> 00:45:04.800
Oh I'm gonna I'm gonna write it on I'm gonna write it on

00:45:08.880 --> 00:45:11.120
but it's that's a good way to play with those ideas and think about them.

00:45:11.200 --> 00:45:15.520
Okay, like well if uh Leatherface and Texas Chainsaw Massacre was four feet tall would that

00:45:15.520 --> 00:45:16.160
be a horror movie?

00:45:16.560 --> 00:45:18.160
Well maybe not, right?

00:45:18.320 --> 00:45:22.720
Uh or if Jason, if you put him against a bunch of from Friday the thirteenth, if you put

00:45:22.720 --> 00:45:25.040
him against a bunch of Green Berets, is that a horror movie?

00:45:25.360 --> 00:45:26.880
No, it's maybe more of an action movie.

00:45:27.450 --> 00:45:27.610
Yeah.

00:45:28.170 --> 00:45:31.530
And if you see that in some of those sequels, you see like where they get in these new

00:45:31.530 --> 00:45:34.250
contexts where it does shift to more of an action film.

00:45:34.410 --> 00:45:34.650
Right.

00:45:34.890 --> 00:45:39.850
I mean, z zombie movies are a good example of like playing with this border between action

00:45:39.850 --> 00:45:40.490
and horror.

00:45:40.650 --> 00:45:45.530
Because sometimes like the protagonists have like shotguns and weapons, and they're just

00:45:45.530 --> 00:45:48.650
blowing up the zombies, and then it feels like more of an action movie because they're more

00:45:48.650 --> 00:45:49.370
equally matched.

00:45:49.610 --> 00:45:49.770
Right.

00:45:50.010 --> 00:45:53.450
But you know, if if again, if it's the cheerleading squad that's being hunted by zombies,

00:45:53.530 --> 00:45:56.410
it becomes more of a straightforward horror movie.

00:45:56.620 --> 00:46:00.380
Um so what do you think is going on with with zombie movies.

00:46:00.700 --> 00:46:02.060
Yeah, what is going on with zombies?

00:46:02.140 --> 00:46:02.380
Yeah, yeah.

00:46:02.460 --> 00:46:03.660
What's that architect?

00:46:03.820 --> 00:46:04.700
Yeah, what is a zombie?

00:46:05.020 --> 00:46:05.260
Yeah.

00:46:05.420 --> 00:46:10.940
That's a great I think I just watched 28 years later, like this past week, which great

00:46:10.940 --> 00:46:11.100
movie.

00:46:11.260 --> 00:46:13.900
Definitely leans more action than than horror in some ways.

00:46:13.980 --> 00:46:17.100
There's like some distinct horror elements and then some action elements.

00:46:17.420 --> 00:46:21.010
Like very distinct, like, oh my god, this is definitely a horror movie, and then some like

00:46:21.090 --> 00:46:22.290
a lot of action elements.

00:46:22.450 --> 00:46:26.530
Um, I think zombie movies are crowd pleasers.

00:46:26.610 --> 00:46:30.770
So, like some of the biggest uh horror film hits are zombie movies.

00:46:30.850 --> 00:46:34.530
World War Z is a great example, one of the highest grossing movies of all time, certainly

00:46:34.530 --> 00:46:36.770
one of the highest grossing horror movies of all time.

00:46:37.250 --> 00:46:42.610
Um, The Walking Dead, you know, probably one of the most watched TV shows of all time.

00:46:42.930 --> 00:46:45.060
Uh and yeah, the question is why?

00:46:45.140 --> 00:46:47.380
Because you would think they would actually be more aversive because they're gross.

00:46:47.460 --> 00:46:51.060
Like zombies, zombie movies are some of the grossest horror movies.

00:46:51.220 --> 00:46:54.580
They love doing like up close shots of you know their arms falling off or biting their

00:46:54.580 --> 00:46:56.420
necks and ripping their flesh out, right?

00:46:56.900 --> 00:47:00.820
Um I think there's two reasons that zombie movies are so popular.

00:47:01.060 --> 00:47:03.300
I think one is the thing that David just said.

00:47:03.540 --> 00:47:05.780
Most of them start out kind of scary.

00:47:05.860 --> 00:47:09.860
It's like nobody knows what's going on and they're incredibly underprepared, and the the

00:47:09.860 --> 00:47:12.470
zombies are overwhelming them.

00:47:12.550 --> 00:47:15.990
Oh, like more a more formidable group than the human group.

00:47:16.230 --> 00:47:19.510
Over time, the human group gets weapons, gets better defenses.

00:47:19.670 --> 00:47:20.870
They do what humans do, right?

00:47:20.950 --> 00:47:22.550
They kind of learn and adapt.

00:47:22.870 --> 00:47:27.670
And it becomes more of a almost like an action drama or something, or a thriller, more of a

00:47:27.670 --> 00:47:29.990
thriller, kind of like a group-based thriller.

00:47:32.230 --> 00:47:32.950
I think that's one reason.

00:47:33.110 --> 00:47:38.900
I think the other reason is that zombies actually tap into uh

00:47:39.060 --> 00:47:43.540
we haven't really talked about the morbid curiosity scale much yet, but I created this

00:47:43.540 --> 00:47:45.380
scale to measure trait morbid curiosity.

00:47:45.460 --> 00:47:47.300
And there are four domains to it, right?

00:47:47.460 --> 00:47:49.540
So there's uh a domain about violence.

00:47:49.620 --> 00:47:54.580
So kind of your interest in, let's say, like MMA would be a good example of a high violence

00:47:54.580 --> 00:47:56.500
score on the morbid curiosity scale.

00:47:56.660 --> 00:47:58.260
There's one about body violations.

00:47:58.340 --> 00:48:03.490
Um, that would be an interest in like medical oddities or surgeries or uh injuries or

00:48:03.490 --> 00:48:04.450
things like that.

00:48:04.690 --> 00:48:06.930
There's one about uh the minds of dangerous people.

00:48:07.010 --> 00:48:11.650
So sort of understanding uh and predicting people who act like predators, people who have

00:48:11.730 --> 00:48:17.250
who hide their intentions, who are um uh trying to harm you without letting you know it.

00:48:17.490 --> 00:48:23.240
Um, and then there is supernatural, which is kind of this uh it's it's got a lot of layers

00:48:23.240 --> 00:48:23.400
to it.

00:48:23.480 --> 00:48:27.720
But the simple way to say it is that uh dangers that aren't incredibly clear to us yet, or

00:48:27.720 --> 00:48:32.040
we don't have good access to understand how dangerous they are aliens, ghosts, demons,

00:48:32.200 --> 00:48:32.520
whatever.

00:48:32.680 --> 00:48:36.120
Like we get a sense they're dangerous because they're hiding from us and they have these

00:48:36.120 --> 00:48:39.320
incredible technologies or abilities to slip into other worlds.

00:48:39.480 --> 00:48:43.480
Um, but because they're not right in front of us, we can't study them well, we can't

00:48:43.480 --> 00:48:44.280
understand them well.

00:48:44.520 --> 00:48:48.280
So you have those four categories, and they tend to correlate pretty highly, but there are

00:48:48.280 --> 00:48:49.640
some distinctions between them.

00:48:49.800 --> 00:48:53.230
Uh, And they do load onto this kind of single factor of morbid curiosity.

00:48:53.390 --> 00:48:58.350
Now, if you look at zombie movies, zombies are human-like, seem to have intentions.

00:48:58.510 --> 00:48:59.790
Certainly they're hungry.

00:49:00.270 --> 00:49:02.750
So they kind of tap into that minds of dangerous people thing.

00:49:02.830 --> 00:49:05.790
Like, is this person like, do they have intentions or not?

00:49:06.030 --> 00:49:10.750
They tap into the violence part because, of course, when a zombie catches you, it enacts

00:49:10.750 --> 00:49:12.190
incredible violence upon you.

00:49:12.460 --> 00:49:17.180
The outcome of that violence is body violation because they're kind of rotting, their flesh

00:49:17.180 --> 00:49:17.740
is falling off.

00:49:17.820 --> 00:49:20.140
And then if they catch you, your flesh is falling off.

00:49:20.380 --> 00:49:23.980
Uh, and they tap into the supernatural a little bit because it's not clear why they're

00:49:23.980 --> 00:49:26.060
doing what they're doing, why they're zombies, are they humans?

00:49:26.140 --> 00:49:26.700
Are they something else?

00:49:26.860 --> 00:49:27.420
Will they change?

00:49:27.500 --> 00:49:28.780
We don't know enough about them.

00:49:29.020 --> 00:49:32.700
And so they sort of uh there's something for everyone.

00:49:32.780 --> 00:49:37.660
Like, no matter where your morbid curiosity kind of falls, zombie movies have something for

00:49:37.660 --> 00:49:37.900
you.

00:49:38.060 --> 00:49:43.710
Um, so I think that combined with the sort of transition they take from early

00:49:43.710 --> 00:49:49.310
horror, which captures your attention, to more of an action thriller, which maybe sustains

00:49:49.310 --> 00:49:50.590
your attention a little better.

00:49:50.750 --> 00:49:53.230
Um, makes them really good for things like TV shows.

00:49:53.310 --> 00:49:57.870
That's why The Walking Dead had like 11 seasons and five spinoffs or whatever.

00:49:58.030 --> 00:50:01.630
You know, uh, there's an infinite number of stories you can tell about that and you can

00:50:01.630 --> 00:50:03.390
kind of just keep iterating on that.

00:50:03.780 --> 00:50:04.340
Yeah, totally.

00:50:04.500 --> 00:50:08.740
And there's also the contagion element, which also gives gives rise to all sorts of

00:50:08.980 --> 00:50:12.100
subplots and conflicts, you know, where if someone is infected, they're going to turn into

00:50:12.100 --> 00:50:16.740
a zombie, you know, all that yeah, all that stuff, um which might tap into our disgust.

00:50:16.820 --> 00:50:16.980
Yeah.

00:50:17.540 --> 00:50:17.940
Exactly.

00:50:18.100 --> 00:50:23.860
And I think infection too, certainly historically, like pre-germ theory of disease,

00:50:24.180 --> 00:50:29.090
um most diseases, infections were given a supernatural explanation, right?

00:50:29.170 --> 00:50:30.370
It's something that we couldn't explain.

00:50:30.450 --> 00:50:31.810
Like, why is this person getting sick?

00:50:31.970 --> 00:50:35.570
Why are they getting uh you know open source all over their body?

00:50:35.650 --> 00:50:37.330
Why are they acting insane?

00:50:37.570 --> 00:50:43.490
All of these things that we now attribute to diseases or uh of various kinds, infectious or

00:50:43.490 --> 00:50:47.170
otherwise, um, we used to attribute to supernatural causes.

00:50:47.330 --> 00:50:53.250
I have a quote in my book uh about an anthropologist who goes to this tribe that has a

00:50:53.250 --> 00:50:55.200
really bad guinea word problem.

00:50:55.440 --> 00:50:59.840
And so she encourages them to like boil their water so that they can kill the worms.

00:50:59.920 --> 00:51:03.600
And they kind of laugh at her and they're like, Well, that doesn't stop the witches who are

00:51:03.600 --> 00:51:04.400
putting the worms there.

00:51:04.480 --> 00:51:07.440
That doesn't stop the witches from from causing these problems.

00:51:07.680 --> 00:51:13.440
Um, so I think that infection, even when we understand scientifically what it is, like, oh,

00:51:13.520 --> 00:51:17.520
I'm sick, I have whatever a virus or a bacterial infection.

00:51:17.770 --> 00:51:21.530
uh, it probably taps into something about like an unknown danger.

00:51:21.610 --> 00:51:25.130
And that's kind of a taps into that supernatural element as well.

00:51:25.450 --> 00:51:31.050
Yeah, I think that supernatural category is uh, I mean, I don't know if the best way to

00:51:31.050 --> 00:51:35.210
characterize it is supernatural or scientific, and and like I'm I'm I know you're not

00:51:35.210 --> 00:51:39.050
saying that, but even like for for the listeners, in the sense of, you know, from the

00:51:39.050 --> 00:51:43.290
evolved psychology perspective, and I think Rob Boyd used to say this all the time: is like

00:51:43.600 --> 00:51:45.920
all of life is like very causally opaque.

00:51:46.000 --> 00:51:47.520
This is also a John Tube point.

00:51:47.680 --> 00:51:52.720
And so to the extent that there are sort of like known co-relationships, like you don't

00:51:52.720 --> 00:51:57.520
know why we put this in the food and this is what we do, but we just do it, you know?

00:51:57.680 --> 00:52:02.320
And so there's sort of you can imagine there's selection for this placeholder of like very

00:52:02.320 --> 00:52:05.850
opaque causality, and we can kind of laugh at people.

00:52:05.930 --> 00:52:09.850
I like we had this episode with Brenda Bowser uh where somebody was killed.

00:52:10.010 --> 00:52:13.450
It was like a for real like murder where there was like blood on the walls.

00:52:13.690 --> 00:52:17.610
And David, do you remember what the um what was the attribution?

00:52:17.930 --> 00:52:19.130
Oh how how could I forget?

00:52:19.210 --> 00:52:19.370
Yeah.

00:52:19.530 --> 00:52:19.690
Yeah.

00:52:19.850 --> 00:52:23.130
So they they attributed the murder to to a phantasm.

00:52:23.530 --> 00:52:24.090
Phantasm.

00:52:24.570 --> 00:52:24.730
Yeah.

00:52:24.970 --> 00:52:25.850
Yeah, exactly.

00:52:26.010 --> 00:52:31.450
And so like this idea, and I mean Brenda's idea was sort of that was what they attributed

00:52:31.450 --> 00:52:37.140
to, to sort of uh and maybe self-consciously or not, but it doesn't really matter,

00:52:37.300 --> 00:52:41.940
to sort of quell the repercussions, the social repercussions of who did it.

00:52:42.020 --> 00:52:47.460
It was a way to sort of, you know, stick this, this, to end the end the conflict there.

00:52:47.700 --> 00:52:53.220
But I think for everything of like, you know, why is there disease or anything, um, yeah,

00:52:53.300 --> 00:52:57.710
this idea of sort sort of spirituality, like this placeholder, whatever you want to call

00:52:57.710 --> 00:52:57.870
that.

00:52:58.030 --> 00:53:00.670
I assume that's also what we all are doing with science, too.

00:53:00.750 --> 00:53:05.790
Like whatever we think, you know, whatever forces are, like these occult forces that Newton

00:53:05.790 --> 00:53:06.590
discovered, right?

00:53:06.750 --> 00:53:12.350
Like this just this just slots into that evolves entry of like the world is causally

00:53:12.350 --> 00:53:16.990
opaque, and I'm just gonna like, okay, tentative thing, and I'm just gonna stick some story

00:53:16.990 --> 00:53:17.470
onto it.

00:53:17.550 --> 00:53:19.230
That's sort of it's the ontology.

00:53:19.310 --> 00:53:22.510
Uh well, and uh Aaron, I think it's Aaron Leitner and N.

00:53:22.590 --> 00:53:27.780
Hagen, they uh published a paper a year or two ago that I think is probably the best uh

00:53:27.860 --> 00:53:32.580
sort of EV psych approach to why do we believe in the supernatural that I've seen in their

00:53:32.580 --> 00:53:36.660
explanation is that it gives us a starting point to kind of ratchet from and then produce

00:53:36.660 --> 00:53:41.060
decisions from to explore identity, to explore space, you know, uh from.

00:53:41.300 --> 00:53:44.180
Because otherwise, you know, if I ask, well, why did this happen?

00:53:44.340 --> 00:53:45.540
I have an infinite number of answers.

00:53:45.620 --> 00:53:47.860
There's an infinite number of places I can start.

00:53:48.100 --> 00:53:53.430
Uh but if but if I just have a few assumptions, you know, that an agent caused it,

00:53:53.990 --> 00:53:58.550
that radically constrains the number of possibilities of what happened and how do I deal

00:53:58.550 --> 00:54:00.790
with it, how do I avoid it, how do I whatever?

00:54:01.430 --> 00:54:03.270
How do I do anything about it?

00:54:03.750 --> 00:54:08.790
Um and so even though that's wrong a lot, it's right enough and it's better than not having

00:54:08.790 --> 00:54:09.670
any starting point.

00:54:09.830 --> 00:54:10.070
Yeah.

00:54:10.390 --> 00:54:14.920
Um I think the starting point we have is, you know, well, maybe someone did it.

00:54:15.080 --> 00:54:18.440
Well, if someone did it and they weren't here, they must have powers of some kind.

00:54:18.600 --> 00:54:20.600
If they have those kind of powers, they must be pretty strong.

00:54:20.680 --> 00:54:24.040
I should probably be afraid of them or try to, you know, get away from them or deal with

00:54:24.040 --> 00:54:26.840
them or collect allies to deal with them.

00:54:27.160 --> 00:54:27.400
Yeah.

00:54:27.640 --> 00:54:32.040
To not go too far afield of zombies, and then we can go on to something else.

00:54:32.200 --> 00:54:36.200
But uh, I was also wondering if, because when David was asking that, I had the same

00:54:36.200 --> 00:54:41.490
question about what's up with zombies and this idea of contagion, where in addition to sort

00:54:41.490 --> 00:54:45.810
of the deep structure grammar of there's these things about body violations and about, you

00:54:45.810 --> 00:54:50.690
know, formidability, I wonder what you think about sort of these like archetype things

00:54:50.850 --> 00:54:55.890
where, you know, clearly like people, you know, and Ed Hagen, you know, again to Ed Hagen,

00:54:55.970 --> 00:55:00.980
you know, there's this long history of sort of zoonotic uh infection in people.

00:55:01.300 --> 00:55:07.060
Um, and a reliably occurring thing is like just differences in people's sort

00:55:07.060 --> 00:55:09.620
of state, you know, like am I been poisoned?

00:55:09.780 --> 00:55:10.740
Am I sick?

00:55:11.060 --> 00:55:17.060
Um, the the sort of like these sort of archetypes, like I think it's an easy thing to

00:55:17.060 --> 00:55:17.220
think.

00:55:17.300 --> 00:55:21.140
And I imagine many evolutionary psychologists when watching a zombie movie have thought,

00:55:21.300 --> 00:55:27.230
gee, I wonder if that's because a reliable part of our history has been like people acting

00:55:27.230 --> 00:55:28.590
weirdly when they're infected.

00:55:28.910 --> 00:55:30.510
Do you buy that or is that too facile?

00:55:30.670 --> 00:55:31.150
Or what do you think?

00:55:31.310 --> 00:55:31.950
No, no, no, no.

00:55:32.030 --> 00:55:35.790
I think that's um I would be surprised if that does not contribute to it, right?

00:55:35.870 --> 00:55:39.870
I think that plays into that again, kind of the the minds of dangerous people aspect of

00:55:39.870 --> 00:55:41.470
like, well, what's going on with these people?

00:55:41.630 --> 00:55:42.430
Are they sick?

00:55:42.590 --> 00:55:45.310
Are they like just violent and and awful?

00:55:45.470 --> 00:55:50.190
Like what's and I think you see that explicitly made in a lot of zombie movies and TV shows

00:55:50.270 --> 00:55:54.320
where it's like, um, well, I think we can find a cure and bring them back, right?

00:55:54.480 --> 00:55:56.400
I think that they're still human underneath.

00:55:56.480 --> 00:56:01.040
I think that um maybe if we just do X, Y, or Z, we can get them back.

00:56:01.120 --> 00:56:04.080
And I think that plays into that intuition that you just mentioned.

00:56:04.240 --> 00:56:09.360
Um, that, you know, we've had to deal with people who kind of looked and maybe acted like

00:56:09.360 --> 00:56:15.280
zombies uh because they were uh sick and drinking lead polluted water and uh all kinds of

00:56:15.280 --> 00:56:16.880
other nasty things that made them crazy.

00:56:17.040 --> 00:56:17.280
Right.

00:56:17.360 --> 00:56:21.120
Uh that was probably not an unusual thing for most of human history.

00:56:21.410 --> 00:56:26.450
Or we ran into other uh species of hominids that didn't speak our language and were acted

00:56:26.450 --> 00:56:32.370
differently from us and um maybe looked like monsters of certain kinds, like Bigfoot or

00:56:32.370 --> 00:56:34.210
Yetis or other kinds of things like that.

00:56:34.450 --> 00:56:39.170
One of my favorite um things that I've seen, which I don't know if I believe it or not, but

00:56:39.170 --> 00:56:42.960
it certainly makes for a good story, is that uh, you know, the existence of the uncanny the

00:56:42.960 --> 00:56:43.520
uncanny valley.

00:56:43.680 --> 00:56:49.040
So this idea that as things become more human looking, um, we like them until they get

00:56:49.040 --> 00:56:52.640
about 70 or 80% human looking, and it takes a huge dip and we don't like them at all.

00:56:52.800 --> 00:56:56.480
And then when they get like 95% human looking, we start to like them again.

00:56:56.720 --> 00:57:01.120
Um, one of my favorite things I've seen is that, well, that uh the reason that we find that

00:57:01.120 --> 00:57:05.090
creepier, the fact that we find that creepier, a bit scary, suggests that we had something

00:57:05.090 --> 00:57:08.690
to be scared of in the past for things that looked kind of human but weren't.

00:57:08.930 --> 00:57:11.490
Um so other other hominid species, right?

00:57:11.570 --> 00:57:15.810
Was I think what they were hinting at, like Neanderthals that were violent or dangerous

00:57:15.810 --> 00:57:20.450
towards us, or uh Denizovens, or any other number of, you know, now they've discovered like

00:57:20.450 --> 00:57:23.890
four or five different hominid species that existed alongside Homo sapiens.

00:57:24.610 --> 00:57:28.840
Um and, you know, while I don't think there's any evidence for that claim, it certainly

00:57:28.920 --> 00:57:32.600
like seems plausible to me that that's one reason why we might have this like strange

00:57:32.680 --> 00:57:38.680
uncanny valley uh response to things that look and act pretty human, but

00:57:38.680 --> 00:57:40.760
there's just like something off about them.

00:57:41.000 --> 00:57:41.480
Yeah.

00:57:41.800 --> 00:57:43.000
Similar with zombies, right?

00:57:43.080 --> 00:57:47.160
I think a a big explanation that, you know, before I started doing work that I'm doing now

00:57:47.240 --> 00:57:51.080
that I ran into for why we like zombies or why we find them scary, rather, is that well,

00:57:51.160 --> 00:57:53.000
they trigger our uncanny valley response.

00:57:53.160 --> 00:57:57.190
But then, you know, you just the question to ask is, well, what does that even mean?

00:57:57.350 --> 00:57:57.910
What why?

00:57:58.070 --> 00:57:58.470
You know?

00:57:58.790 --> 00:57:59.030
Yeah.

00:57:59.190 --> 00:57:59.590
Yeah.

00:57:59.830 --> 00:58:05.830
Um, this definition of horror too, it strikes me as, you know, there's a population of

00:58:05.830 --> 00:58:09.350
people for whom almost everything is horror than, and that is children.

00:58:09.430 --> 00:58:10.630
Uh uh, right.

00:58:10.790 --> 00:58:13.910
Because I mean, the world is much more formidable than you.

00:58:14.150 --> 00:58:15.430
Everyone is more formidable.

00:58:15.670 --> 00:58:20.470
And I was also thinking about, you know, like a lot of Disney stories are horror, right?

00:58:20.550 --> 00:58:22.310
If you kind of take this definition.

00:58:22.700 --> 00:58:28.380
Um and so I has that been part of the and I you know there's a lot to ask about

00:58:28.380 --> 00:58:32.940
kids and development of this, but has that been part of the research on like or is that

00:58:32.940 --> 00:58:34.620
sort of a a blind spot so far?

00:58:34.780 --> 00:58:36.940
Not in yours, I'm saying, but just sort of generally, yeah.

00:58:37.260 --> 00:58:37.820
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:58:37.900 --> 00:58:43.900
It's definitely not a part of my research because uh it's much more, you know, it takes

00:58:43.990 --> 00:58:47.910
special training to work with kids and thinking a certain kind of way and designing

00:58:47.910 --> 00:58:48.950
experiments in a certain kind of way.

00:58:49.030 --> 00:58:52.310
And it's something that I'm not an expert at when it comes to those kinds of things.

00:58:52.630 --> 00:58:54.870
But that it's more difficult IRB-wise.

00:58:54.950 --> 00:58:58.630
There's just a lot of reasons of why working with kids is uh is difficult.

00:58:58.950 --> 00:59:04.870
Um but that being said, uh some of my colleagues at the recreational fear lag are

00:59:04.870 --> 00:59:09.180
uh developmental psychologists and they have done these kinds of studies with kids,

00:59:09.340 --> 00:59:15.180
specifically looking at things like um what kinds of stories do

00:59:15.340 --> 00:59:21.020
daycares or or kindergartens um teachers tell the students, right?

00:59:21.260 --> 00:59:24.620
A lot of times they're scary stories, and a lot of times they're scary stories because

00:59:24.620 --> 00:59:26.300
that's what the kids request.

00:59:26.700 --> 00:59:31.340
Uh there was this paper that just came out by them that I haven't actually read yet, but it

00:59:31.340 --> 00:59:37.010
looked at different types of fear, uh fearful, playful activities that kids um

00:59:37.090 --> 00:59:37.650
engage in.

00:59:37.730 --> 00:59:40.530
And it turns out they engage, I mean I kind of skimmed it, they engage in a lot of

00:59:40.530 --> 00:59:42.290
different scary activities.

00:59:42.450 --> 00:59:44.370
And they don't look scary to us because we're adults.

00:59:44.530 --> 00:59:48.690
Like you just said, the world is uh much, much more of a horror story to kids because

00:59:48.690 --> 00:59:50.370
everything is more formidable to them.

00:59:50.690 --> 00:59:55.330
So when we watch kids, you know, play even pretend games like tag or hide and seek or

00:59:55.330 --> 00:59:59.140
whatever, that doesn't look scary to us, but to a kid, hide and seek it, hide and seek and

00:59:59.140 --> 01:00:00.740
tag are just predator prey games, right?

01:00:00.820 --> 01:00:03.940
It's like somebody is it and they're trying to get you and they're either chasing you or

01:00:03.940 --> 01:00:05.460
they're looking for you and you're hiding.

01:00:05.620 --> 01:00:06.020
Yeah.

01:00:06.260 --> 01:00:12.260
Um and I think that kids, you know, I I give a story in my book of a time when I I

01:00:12.260 --> 01:00:16.020
had this job as a mad scientist where I would do like summer camps, like science summer

01:00:16.020 --> 01:00:16.260
camps.

01:00:16.610 --> 01:00:17.330
I was like a knockoff.

01:00:17.410 --> 01:00:18.610
I was like a knockoff Bill and I.

01:00:18.770 --> 01:00:19.810
Like you can't afford Bill and I.

01:00:19.970 --> 01:00:20.690
So you get this company.

01:00:21.170 --> 01:00:23.730
I'm imagining like blood, blood-splattered lab coat.

01:00:24.850 --> 01:00:25.330
I wish.

01:00:25.410 --> 01:00:25.810
I wish.

01:00:25.970 --> 01:00:26.930
It was more tame than that.

01:00:27.010 --> 01:00:30.210
It was just like you, you know, you teach the kids a wide variety of topics.

01:00:30.290 --> 01:00:34.530
Um, you know, everything from forensics and entomology to chemistry and you know, biology,

01:00:34.690 --> 01:00:38.610
everything you could do that was interesting enough to keep kids' attention from ages like

01:00:38.800 --> 01:00:40.000
four to 10.

01:00:40.160 --> 01:00:40.480
Yeah.

01:00:40.880 --> 01:00:45.200
And one of the things I found being I was at the time I was, you know, in my 20s, didn't

01:00:45.200 --> 01:00:47.280
have kids, I never taught kids.

01:00:47.520 --> 01:00:49.440
It's a different skill set, like I mentioned.

01:00:49.680 --> 01:00:52.880
One of the things I quickly learned is that you have to take a lot of breaks.

01:00:53.040 --> 01:00:56.400
Like you gotta give them time to run around and and and be kids.

01:00:56.560 --> 01:00:59.600
And they want to play games and they want to do things that are interactive.

01:00:59.850 --> 01:01:04.810
And um, I started playing the game Mafia with them, uh, which is like the game werewolf.

01:01:04.890 --> 01:01:07.930
If you've if you're familiar with that, I'm sure David, you certainly are.

01:01:08.170 --> 01:01:13.850
Um and so the idea is that you know, there's this town, and there are these two, usually

01:01:13.930 --> 01:01:16.970
two killers, and like a sheriff and a doctor, and the rest of the people are just

01:01:16.970 --> 01:01:17.770
townspeople.

01:01:17.930 --> 01:01:21.210
And the kids kind of put their heads down and they go to sleep at night, and I play the

01:01:21.210 --> 01:01:23.450
part of the narrator and I narrate the story of what happens.

01:01:23.530 --> 01:01:27.940
Like, oh, the in this case, the mafia members come out and they killed a member of the

01:01:27.940 --> 01:01:29.300
community last night.

01:01:29.460 --> 01:01:33.380
You know, you have to find out who they are and uh and get justice and you hang them.

01:01:33.540 --> 01:01:37.940
It's like kind of a violent game, but I I I kept it very tame because I had like again five

01:01:37.940 --> 01:01:38.500
to ten year olds.

01:01:38.660 --> 01:01:41.540
I didn't want them going home to their parents and saying, Oh, I killed my best friend at

01:01:41.620 --> 01:01:42.980
set mad science camp today.

01:01:43.060 --> 01:01:46.100
You know, if they were German kids, they would have been perfectly fine.

01:01:46.180 --> 01:01:47.300
This is a very cultural specific.

01:01:47.700 --> 01:01:49.700
It turns out like yeah.

01:01:50.020 --> 01:01:54.990
Yeah, it well, so what I found was that in one of those papers I mentioned, Uh, that's one

01:01:54.990 --> 01:01:59.390
of the games that uh kids in Denmark love to play, like little kids love to play that game.

01:01:59.470 --> 01:01:59.630
Yeah.

01:01:59.790 --> 01:02:03.470
And I quickly discovered that American kids also love that game when you give them the

01:02:03.470 --> 01:02:03.790
opportunity.

01:02:03.950 --> 01:02:07.550
And what was even better is that, you know, when they got good at it and they started

01:02:07.550 --> 01:02:10.910
understanding the rules, I would let one of them be the narrator so that I didn't have to

01:02:10.910 --> 01:02:11.070
do it.

01:02:11.150 --> 01:02:13.310
And because they wanted to play the part of Storyteller.

01:02:14.110 --> 01:02:18.670
But when they were the storyteller, it was like the worst gruesome horror story of all

01:02:18.670 --> 01:02:18.910
time.

01:02:19.070 --> 01:02:20.270
Mine, mine was super tame.

01:02:20.350 --> 01:02:25.140
It would just be, you know, the mafia came to town and they they killed a person.

01:02:25.300 --> 01:02:26.580
You need to figure out who did it, right?

01:02:26.820 --> 01:02:30.740
Try to keep it like as vanilla as possible because they were like young kids and not my

01:02:30.740 --> 01:02:31.140
kids.

01:02:31.380 --> 01:02:35.460
And then when they became the narrators, it was just like, oh, they they had a knife and

01:02:35.460 --> 01:02:39.060
they shoved it in his stomach and they pulled it all the way up to his head and then they

01:02:39.060 --> 01:02:42.100
pulled his heart, you know, just like these gruesome, awful things.

01:02:42.500 --> 01:02:48.190
Um, so they love, I think kids love exploring those kind of topics in a safe way, right?

01:02:48.270 --> 01:02:53.310
That's one way for them to kind of play with those ideas and play with like imagine those

01:02:53.310 --> 01:02:58.110
scenarios and what that would be like and then learn how to kind of navigate like a horror

01:02:58.110 --> 01:03:00.990
story, but in a but in a in a way that's not in their face.

01:03:01.070 --> 01:03:01.950
It's not a film, right?

01:03:02.030 --> 01:03:04.430
Like film is very real, looks very real.

01:03:04.590 --> 01:03:04.670
Right.

01:03:04.830 --> 01:03:08.910
And if you're doing play pretend with your friends and like you're telling the story and

01:03:08.910 --> 01:03:12.910
there's no visuals, it's much easier to take a step back and kind of navigate that.

01:03:13.200 --> 01:03:13.360
Right.

01:03:13.440 --> 01:03:17.440
It's it's sort of sort of a callback to this point we made earlier, which is sort of by

01:03:17.520 --> 01:03:20.800
it's the people who feel better after they listen to true crime.

01:03:20.960 --> 01:03:26.720
It's that maybe this cartoonish view of like we're protecting kids by keeping all these

01:03:26.720 --> 01:03:28.000
things away from them.

01:03:28.480 --> 01:03:32.000
By inhibiting that natural curiosity, it might actually backfire.

01:03:32.160 --> 01:03:38.050
And that uh letting kids actually sort of in a in a in their own sort of titration

01:03:38.130 --> 01:03:41.330
uh of this stuff sort of d interact with this stuff.

01:03:41.490 --> 01:03:45.570
And it's funny too because, you know, like Germany sort of famously is sort of like I

01:03:45.570 --> 01:03:51.250
bought a um when I was living in Germany I bought a brother's grim uh German language like,

01:03:51.330 --> 01:03:52.610
you know, kids book.

01:03:52.770 --> 01:03:56.930
And, you know, even if you read these German fairy tales and Germans will say this all the

01:03:56.930 --> 01:04:02.210
time, the English translations of them are still quite bad, but they're often already

01:04:02.340 --> 01:04:08.260
filtered toned down toned down way toned down i mean it's incredible um you know like

01:04:08.340 --> 01:04:13.540
just sort of like you know like cannibalism and like death and like all of these like

01:04:13.620 --> 01:04:17.540
really and i and i it's kind of a funny thing and everybody laughs about it germans laugh

01:04:17.540 --> 01:04:21.700
about it americans laugh about it but i do wonder if you know there's there's all this data

01:04:21.700 --> 01:04:26.810
that like especially american kids are super anxious super scared.

01:04:26.970 --> 01:04:30.490
And there's also concomitant with that is like just this quote unquote helicopter

01:04:30.490 --> 01:04:33.050
parenting, or just like really trying to, you know.

01:04:33.210 --> 01:04:38.650
And I wonder if to some degree, you know, it's kind of like this uh where it's almost like

01:04:38.650 --> 01:04:42.810
we have this like hygiene of like we're just trying to keep super clean and it sort of

01:04:42.810 --> 01:04:43.370
backfires.

01:04:43.450 --> 01:04:47.530
I wonder if the same thing with sort of like bad things or like scary things.

01:04:47.610 --> 01:04:49.610
I wonder if a similar thing happens.

01:04:50.010 --> 01:04:54.570
Yeah, I mean, I would uh I feel pretty confident in saying that it's it's not good

01:04:55.960 --> 01:04:59.160
to prevent kids from experiencing fear in a safe way.

01:04:59.320 --> 01:05:01.960
Because then how are they ever going to learn how to deal with that emotion when they're

01:05:01.960 --> 01:05:03.000
teenagers or adults?

01:05:03.080 --> 01:05:03.320
Right.

01:05:03.560 --> 01:05:03.880
Right.

01:05:04.040 --> 01:05:07.320
Uh in fact, they're going to think that they should avoid it and they're going to become

01:05:07.400 --> 01:05:10.040
avoidant, which is not a great coping style.

01:05:10.360 --> 01:05:15.240
Um and I when I was so I was in Germany, last time I was in Germany, it was like a year ago

01:05:15.240 --> 01:05:15.880
or two years ago.

01:05:15.960 --> 01:05:19.400
And I went to the Black Forest where all the Grimm's fairy tales are supposedly take place,

01:05:19.480 --> 01:05:19.640
right?

01:05:19.800 --> 01:05:22.040
It's like, man, I can, I can understand why they take place here.

01:05:22.120 --> 01:05:24.630
It's a frightening, like, it's a very cool place to be.

01:05:24.870 --> 01:05:25.990
Man, it's like very scary.

01:05:26.070 --> 01:05:27.750
I can imagine, you know, being there after dark.

01:05:27.830 --> 01:05:32.230
It just would be all sorts of horrible things I can imagine coming out of like the bowels

01:05:32.230 --> 01:05:33.110
of that forest.

01:05:33.430 --> 01:05:33.750
Yeah.

01:05:33.910 --> 01:05:39.830
Um, but yeah, I think I think it's uh I I have talked about this um more in my book,

01:05:39.910 --> 01:05:43.110
but less so in my research, because again, I don't really study kids myself, but other

01:05:43.110 --> 01:05:44.470
people do with respect to this.

01:05:44.550 --> 01:05:48.710
And uh I think there's good evidence that you know, preventing kids from engaging in

01:05:48.710 --> 01:05:54.400
thrilling play um seems to correlate with higher

01:05:54.400 --> 01:05:59.920
uh anxiety problems in uh when they're teenagers and adults, like higher incidence of of

01:05:59.920 --> 01:06:01.280
anxiety disorders.

01:06:01.440 --> 01:06:02.800
Uh and it makes sense, right?

01:06:02.880 --> 01:06:06.400
Like if you don't learn how to deal with an emotion, you're not gonna get good at dealing

01:06:06.400 --> 01:06:07.680
with that emotion, right?

01:06:07.920 --> 01:06:11.680
Um, and I think that's one thing that horror fans do well, right?

01:06:11.760 --> 01:06:16.250
They uh they consistently confront feeling afraid and feeling anxious.

01:06:16.410 --> 01:06:20.490
And uh I think there's some evidence that it actually helps them deal with anxiety.

01:06:20.650 --> 01:06:23.770
There was a study that I believe it's a preprint right now, but it's with true crime.

01:06:23.930 --> 01:06:29.690
And it was a diary study um looking at people who were true crime fans and like

01:06:29.770 --> 01:06:32.410
when did they watch their last true crime show?

01:06:32.650 --> 01:06:36.010
How were they feeling that day when they watched it, and the and the day after?

01:06:36.170 --> 01:06:41.520
And there was pretty good evidence that having watched a true crime show on day X would uh

01:06:41.520 --> 01:06:45.280
was correlated with lower anxiety on day X plus one.

01:06:45.440 --> 01:06:51.440
And that feeling anxious was correlated with watching true crime on day X, uh, which

01:06:51.440 --> 01:06:52.720
is stuff that I've hinted at before.

01:06:52.960 --> 01:06:56.800
I have a big theoretical paper kind of laying out some of the reasons why this might be

01:06:56.880 --> 01:07:02.400
with scary narratives generally, like why one, why anxious people seem to be drawn to them

01:07:02.400 --> 01:07:05.200
sometimes, because that seems like the last thing they should be drawn to.

01:07:05.390 --> 01:07:10.030
And two, can it actually be useful or can we leverage it to be useful for some people?

01:07:10.190 --> 01:07:14.910
Um, and the simple answer is that like, well, they seem to be drawn to it because anxiety

01:07:14.910 --> 01:07:15.790
ups your vigilance.

01:07:15.950 --> 01:07:19.150
And if you're upping your vigilance, that's gonna up your vigilance for scary stories too.

01:07:19.230 --> 01:07:21.390
So you're gonna be kind of interested and drawn to that.

01:07:21.550 --> 01:07:26.990
Um, and then the answer for why it might be helpful in the moment is that if you're

01:07:26.990 --> 01:07:31.080
feeling particularly with generalized anxiety, you don't have a source of your anxiety,

01:07:31.160 --> 01:07:32.280
you're just feeling anxious, right?

01:07:32.360 --> 01:07:35.560
It's like really destructive form of anxiety because there's not a lot you can do about it.

01:07:35.640 --> 01:07:38.840
You can't like change the thing that's making you feel anxious because you don't know what

01:07:38.840 --> 01:07:39.240
it is.

01:07:39.480 --> 01:07:41.800
So you get in these big rumination cycles.

01:07:42.040 --> 01:07:45.960
And then, you know, common advice like, oh, try relaxing.

01:07:46.200 --> 01:07:50.280
Doesn't really work for those people because threat tends to have a premium on your

01:07:50.280 --> 01:07:52.360
attention and on your cognitive resources.

01:07:52.520 --> 01:07:56.010
And so when you try to relax, it's just like pretty futile, right?

01:07:56.170 --> 01:07:59.450
Um, but what you can do is maybe fight fire with fire a little bit.

01:07:59.610 --> 01:08:03.770
Go turn on a scary story that will capture your attention or at least compete with your

01:08:03.770 --> 01:08:07.370
attention, compete with ruminating anxious thoughts for your attention.

01:08:07.610 --> 01:08:10.570
And then it draws you in if it's a compelling story, if it's a well-written story,

01:08:10.730 --> 01:08:12.890
well-told story, it'll draw you in.

01:08:12.970 --> 01:08:16.490
And it'll kind of you can't really like worry about you can't actively worry about two

01:08:16.490 --> 01:08:16.970
things at once.

01:08:17.050 --> 01:08:17.930
Like you can try this, right?

01:08:18.010 --> 01:08:19.850
Like try like worrying about two different things.

01:08:19.930 --> 01:08:23.380
You can shift between them, but you can't like hold two of them in your mind at the same

01:08:23.380 --> 01:08:24.420
time and worry about them.

01:08:24.580 --> 01:08:28.820
So if you get sucked into this story, you know, you have 90 minutes of like a

01:08:28.820 --> 01:08:31.860
semi-controlled anxiety, semi-controlled fear.

01:08:31.940 --> 01:08:34.180
You can pause it, you can watch it with lights on, watch it with a friend.

01:08:34.260 --> 01:08:37.300
There's a lot of things you can do to kind of tone down and control the source of the

01:08:37.300 --> 01:08:38.020
anxiety.

01:08:38.180 --> 01:08:42.340
And then after 90 minutes, the thing that was causing your anxiety now is gone, right?

01:08:42.420 --> 01:08:42.820
It goes away.

01:08:42.900 --> 01:08:43.700
The film ends.

01:08:43.780 --> 01:08:48.390
And it kind of uh gives you an off-ramp for those rumination cycles and allows your

01:08:48.390 --> 01:08:52.310
parasympathetic nervous system to activate like it should when a threat goes away, which

01:08:52.310 --> 01:08:55.190
then physiologically calms you down, right?

01:08:55.510 --> 01:08:57.510
Um, that's all in the short term.

01:08:57.670 --> 01:08:59.670
In the long term, we've kind of talked about this.

01:08:59.750 --> 01:09:03.350
Uh, it can give you tools for learning how to deal with anxiety because when you're

01:09:03.350 --> 01:09:08.840
watching a scary movie um or going to a haunted house or playing a scary game, most people

01:09:08.840 --> 01:09:12.280
are actually not trying to make it as scary as possible.

01:09:12.520 --> 01:09:15.640
Like we found this in haunted even in haunted house studies that I've done where we go to a

01:09:15.640 --> 01:09:17.320
haunted attraction in Halloween.

01:09:17.560 --> 01:09:21.720
Um, most people are trying to hit like a sweet spot where like it's is really scary, but

01:09:21.720 --> 01:09:23.160
it's not too much for them to handle.

01:09:23.480 --> 01:09:27.080
Well, by definition, to do that, you have to regulate how afraid you are, right?

01:09:27.160 --> 01:09:30.760
You have to regulate how anxious you're feeling in order to hit that sweet spot.

01:09:31.000 --> 01:09:36.850
Um, and by doing that, you are inherently like just practicing or implicitly practicing

01:09:37.490 --> 01:09:42.850
cognitive uh reappraisal skills, emotion regulation skills, things that you can apply when

01:09:42.850 --> 01:09:46.770
you're feeling afraid or anxious because of something else that's happening in the world.

01:09:47.010 --> 01:09:49.730
And so if you can, if you can train yourself to think about those things and what you're

01:09:49.730 --> 01:09:53.730
doing to calm yourself down, what you're doing to achieve that sweet spot, uh, you might be

01:09:53.730 --> 01:09:58.540
able to recognize some of these tools and then apply them in your life outside of horror

01:09:58.540 --> 01:09:58.940
movies.

01:09:59.180 --> 01:09:59.340
Yeah.

01:09:59.500 --> 01:09:59.980
I like that.

01:10:00.060 --> 01:10:05.420
So Pascal Boyer and Leonard who passed away, Michael Monkruff's advisor, um, they had this

01:10:05.420 --> 01:10:07.580
great paper about sort of anxiety and OCD.

01:10:07.660 --> 01:10:11.420
And we won't go into all those details we should have Pascal on, but this thing about like

01:10:11.420 --> 01:10:15.500
fear, uh the emotional fear is sort of like, you know, there's a situation that needs to be

01:10:15.500 --> 01:10:16.060
reacted to.

01:10:16.220 --> 01:10:18.530
What anxiety is, is harder.

01:10:18.610 --> 01:10:21.490
And their argument is this is one of the reasons why there's more anxiety disorders than

01:10:21.490 --> 01:10:22.050
fear disorders.

01:10:22.130 --> 01:10:25.090
There is, there are obviously phobias, but but there's more anxiety disorders.

01:10:25.170 --> 01:10:31.090
And the idea is that it's sort of the design underlying anxiety is there might be

01:10:31.090 --> 01:10:33.810
something, and there might be something you can do about it.

01:10:33.890 --> 01:10:36.210
But it's just more opaque and more indirect.

01:10:36.290 --> 01:10:40.690
And so it's really interesting how, yeah, if there is this anxiety disorder or you're

01:10:40.690 --> 01:10:45.300
feeling anxiety, it's basically your evolved system telling you there's things to worry

01:10:45.300 --> 01:10:49.140
about and there might be things I need to do and I don't know what to do or I don't know

01:10:49.140 --> 01:10:51.060
what's cause what might be the danger.

01:10:51.220 --> 01:10:56.820
And so if you give people fear um or or this sort of like as you put it this very

01:10:56.820 --> 01:11:02.340
titrated controlled thing it engages this precautionary system

01:11:02.740 --> 01:11:08.710
that sort of is getting the cues that it's doing something right to against the

01:11:08.710 --> 01:11:10.390
dangers and the fears.

01:11:10.630 --> 01:11:11.670
So that's really interesting.

01:11:11.750 --> 01:11:16.630
It really suggests that, you know, we don't always talk about implications on this podcast.

01:11:16.710 --> 01:11:20.550
And we've had gotten reviews of people wanting implications, but this really suggests that

01:11:21.510 --> 01:11:27.190
with anxiety, with fear, um, with people sort of feeling uh um

01:11:27.350 --> 01:11:29.190
like underpowered, right?

01:11:29.350 --> 01:11:34.720
Or just sort of like possibly victims, we we often have this idea that like to protect them

01:11:34.880 --> 01:11:38.800
as parents or as society, we want to which is a good impulse to have.

01:11:38.960 --> 01:11:40.560
It's a noble impulse to have.

01:11:40.720 --> 01:11:41.120
Yeah, they're right.

01:11:41.360 --> 01:11:41.840
Yeah, exactly.

01:11:41.920 --> 01:11:46.160
Like you can see the intentions are well, but it might be that exactly harming them by

01:11:46.160 --> 01:11:51.680
keeping them away from their own interest in things that might seem scary or

01:11:51.680 --> 01:11:53.280
morbid or or whatever.

01:11:53.440 --> 01:11:54.000
Yeah.

01:11:54.410 --> 01:11:54.650
Yeah.

01:11:54.730 --> 01:11:58.250
And I didn't, you know, I didn't go into this trying to, I'm not a clinical psychologist.

01:11:58.410 --> 01:12:03.770
I didn't go into this like trying to find a practical implication of very much an

01:12:03.770 --> 01:12:08.170
impractical theoretical like love just to play with ideas person.

01:12:08.570 --> 01:12:11.530
Um but it but it it just came about as I started studying this.

01:12:11.690 --> 01:12:15.770
I was like, man, this could I well to be honest, like how part of the reason it came about

01:12:15.770 --> 01:12:17.920
is because I would interview horror fans.

01:12:18.000 --> 01:12:21.120
I would read through, you know, threads where they had written about like why they like

01:12:21.120 --> 01:12:22.400
horror and what it does for them.

01:12:22.560 --> 01:12:26.480
And this kept coming up over and over and over again that, like, well, when I'm anxious, I

01:12:26.480 --> 01:12:28.080
seek out horror movies and it helps me.

01:12:28.480 --> 01:12:31.600
And you read that once or twice, and you're like, okay, you know, there's natural variation

01:12:31.600 --> 01:12:34.800
in people that's bound to happen in someone, probably.

01:12:34.960 --> 01:12:36.960
Um, but you see it like a lot.

01:12:37.190 --> 01:12:37.350
No.

01:12:37.590 --> 01:12:41.510
So it's almost like self-medication, like in the same way if you go to an AA meeting,

01:12:41.670 --> 01:12:44.870
there's a lot of people with anxiety disorders that are undiagnosed, and maybe the same

01:12:44.870 --> 01:12:48.070
thing for horror movies, although they're doing much better than ethanol soaked people

01:12:48.150 --> 01:12:49.350
because they're just, you know, watching fiction.

01:12:49.590 --> 01:12:49.670
Yeah.

01:12:49.910 --> 01:12:49.990
Yeah.

01:12:50.070 --> 01:12:52.230
It's like popping an advil when you get a headache, you know?

01:12:52.310 --> 01:12:56.550
It's um and so I thought, okay, well, like this is there's like way too many people saying

01:12:56.550 --> 01:13:01.430
this for this to be just natural variation in whatever trait, right?

01:13:01.590 --> 01:13:03.270
Like this seems like there's something going on here.

01:13:03.350 --> 01:13:06.420
And and most people didn't consciously understand that.

01:13:06.500 --> 01:13:09.140
Some some did, but most people didn't consciously understand that.

01:13:09.300 --> 01:13:11.380
And then I came across this paper.

01:13:11.540 --> 01:13:15.220
Um, it's really one of the only ones I've seen that was like this, but it was a paper

01:13:15.220 --> 01:13:18.340
published in I want to say like 2006 or seven.

01:13:18.500 --> 01:13:22.340
And these researchers, they were media psychology researchers, and they set up a booth

01:13:22.340 --> 01:13:25.700
outside of a blockbuster uh for those young people who are in the world.

01:13:25.860 --> 01:13:29.300
For those who know, yeah, that was back in the day when you put cassette tapes in.

01:13:29.540 --> 01:13:32.870
This is uh and you had to go to a store to get movies.

01:13:32.950 --> 01:13:36.310
So yeah, this is a uh brick and mortar Netflix store.

01:13:36.390 --> 01:13:36.630
Yeah.

01:13:36.790 --> 01:13:39.830
Um yeah, they set up a booth outside of a blockbuster.

01:13:39.910 --> 01:13:43.430
And when people came into the store, they would ask them how they're feeling.

01:13:43.510 --> 01:13:46.710
You know, they want to know basically they wanted to know how does your current mood impact

01:13:46.710 --> 01:13:48.870
the kind of movie you're gonna rent, right?

01:13:49.110 --> 01:13:50.790
And so they would give them these mood questionnaires.

01:13:50.950 --> 01:13:52.070
They would go in, they would rent the movie.

01:13:52.230 --> 01:13:54.630
When they came out, they would say, hey, can you show us what movie you rented?

01:13:54.790 --> 01:14:00.560
And they went in expecting that people would try to, if they were feeling like sad, they

01:14:00.560 --> 01:14:02.560
would try to find a happy movie to regulate their mood.

01:14:02.720 --> 01:14:05.600
They're feeling anxious, they would again try to find kind of a happy movie.

01:14:05.840 --> 01:14:11.440
If they were feeling um, I think what was it was like if they were feeling uh

01:14:11.680 --> 01:14:14.160
joyous, they would try to find like find a comedy movie.

01:14:14.240 --> 01:14:17.120
I didn't really follow their hypotheses very well because it's not the framework that I

01:14:17.120 --> 01:14:17.680
used.

01:14:18.080 --> 01:14:22.270
Um, but the important point here is that they they predicted that people who were feeling

01:14:22.270 --> 01:14:27.790
anxious when they went in uh would seek out something like a happy movie or a comedy to try

01:14:27.790 --> 01:14:30.750
to relieve that anxiety, which is advice that you give to people when they're anxious,

01:14:30.830 --> 01:14:34.670
like, oh, go escape into a film, like go watch a happy movie, go watch a comedy.

01:14:34.910 --> 01:14:36.910
Um, and what they found was the exact opposite.

01:14:37.070 --> 01:14:41.150
People who were anxious going in were the only people who are more likely to rent horror

01:14:41.150 --> 01:14:41.790
movies.

01:14:42.030 --> 01:14:47.460
Um, and at first I was like, well, maybe you know they were anxious because they knew they

01:14:47.460 --> 01:14:48.500
were gonna rent a horror movie.

01:14:48.660 --> 01:14:51.620
Like maybe that's I was trying to like, you know, steel man out a little bit.

01:14:51.700 --> 01:14:55.860
I was like, well, maybe they were anxious because they uh knew they were gonna rent a

01:14:55.860 --> 01:14:58.100
horror movie, and that made them feel anxious about how scared they were gonna be.

01:14:58.180 --> 01:15:02.340
But then I thought, well, that would make that person a very clinically anxious person if

01:15:02.340 --> 01:15:05.860
they were already anxious before they even rented the movie, like they must have very high

01:15:05.860 --> 01:15:07.550
trait anxiety, right?

01:15:07.630 --> 01:15:10.590
Like if you're already feeling anxious before you rent it.

01:15:10.750 --> 01:15:16.750
Um, so in either case, it seems that feeling anxious or a tendency for anxiety does tend to

01:15:16.750 --> 01:15:20.750
correlate with an interest in watching something that makes you feel anxious.

01:15:20.910 --> 01:15:24.030
Um, so that kind of led me down this path of like, okay, well, maybe there's something

01:15:24.030 --> 01:15:24.510
going on here.

01:15:24.590 --> 01:15:29.710
Maybe there's some kind of mechanism that's being triggered in anxious people that makes

01:15:29.710 --> 01:15:35.420
them one seek out things that are scary or safe, scary or scary play, and two

01:15:35.580 --> 01:15:37.420
can actually help them calm down.

01:15:38.860 --> 01:15:44.380
Yeah, it's such a a beautiful example of how taking an evolutionary functional

01:15:44.380 --> 01:15:49.580
perspective uh can bring new insights and practical insights as well.

01:15:49.660 --> 01:15:54.070
Because if you're just thinking about anxiety as just this mental substance of badness and

01:15:54.070 --> 01:15:58.150
we just have to get rid of the badness, well then you're gonna fail to understand what

01:15:58.150 --> 01:16:00.310
anxiety is and how to treat it clinically.

01:16:00.470 --> 01:16:04.230
But if you understand that anxiety exists for a reason, it has a Darwinian function, uh

01:16:04.390 --> 01:16:08.470
it's a mechanism uh that that is there because it helped our ancestors survive and

01:16:08.470 --> 01:16:13.280
reproduce in some way, well then you you you start to think about what why is it there?

01:16:13.440 --> 01:16:14.240
What is it doing?

01:16:14.480 --> 01:16:19.760
Uh and and the answer is well it's it's there to help uh help us think about and learn

01:16:19.760 --> 01:16:23.920
about and manage and navigate dangerous threatening things.

01:16:24.240 --> 01:16:29.600
And the way to give the anxiety what it wants is to give us uh you know

01:16:29.760 --> 01:16:32.240
lessons and knowledge about dangerous things.

01:16:32.400 --> 01:16:34.400
Like that's ultimately what it's motivating us to do.

01:16:34.480 --> 01:16:37.920
It's motivating us to figure out what's dangerous, what's threatening, learn about it,

01:16:38.000 --> 01:16:40.050
master it, navigate it, and deal with it.

01:16:40.210 --> 01:16:43.570
And if you're preventing the anxiety from doing that, well the anxiety is never going to go

01:16:43.570 --> 01:16:43.810
away.

01:16:43.970 --> 01:16:46.290
The way to feed it is to actually it's going to grow.

01:16:46.450 --> 01:16:46.690
Exactly.

01:16:46.930 --> 01:16:47.490
Until you start.

01:16:47.810 --> 01:16:47.970
Yeah.

01:16:48.050 --> 01:16:48.130
Yeah.

01:16:48.450 --> 01:16:50.930
Rosemary's Baby is one of the super scary movies.

01:16:51.010 --> 01:16:53.730
And one of the things that makes it so scary is when she's saying like there's this

01:16:53.730 --> 01:16:54.450
horrible thing happening.

01:16:54.610 --> 01:16:55.730
Everyone's like, no, no, no.

01:16:55.890 --> 01:16:56.690
It's all fine.

01:16:56.850 --> 01:16:57.650
Don't worry about it.

01:16:57.810 --> 01:17:01.060
And it's like, you know, like if you know there's a threat and somebody is telling you,

01:17:01.140 --> 01:17:04.580
like, and everyone around you is like, let's let's just like relax.

01:17:04.900 --> 01:17:06.340
That's a horror movie, right?

01:17:06.500 --> 01:17:07.140
Like, exactly.

01:17:07.300 --> 01:17:12.980
So, no, I love that idea that like the autonomy of um power over things that

01:17:12.980 --> 01:17:17.060
scare you is is the way around anxiety is a great point, David.

01:17:17.380 --> 01:17:20.340
Yeah, and I think that goes back to when we were talking about like what makes a horror

01:17:20.340 --> 01:17:20.500
movie.

01:17:20.580 --> 01:17:22.900
Well, in Rosemary's baby, there's no big scary antagonist.

01:17:23.060 --> 01:17:24.340
So, how could it be a horror?

01:17:24.500 --> 01:17:29.430
Well, like she's very vulnerable because she's obviously experiencing an entirely different

01:17:29.430 --> 01:17:30.230
reality, right?

01:17:30.310 --> 01:17:36.070
So again, I think our mind's intuition is to say something supernatural, something we

01:17:36.070 --> 01:17:40.630
can't access is causing this disturbance, like in our world and in my reality.

01:17:40.790 --> 01:17:45.270
And I think that again maps onto things like diseases that cause us to not think clearly,

01:17:45.350 --> 01:17:51.120
or to score schizophrenia, or things like where our perception of the world is just

01:17:51.120 --> 01:17:53.920
completely shifted and doesn't match what everyone is telling us.

01:17:54.160 --> 01:17:54.480
Yeah.

01:17:54.640 --> 01:17:56.400
And it's sort of a mature view of the world.

01:17:56.560 --> 01:18:00.400
Like even, I mean, Francis Steen, uh, who I'm not sure what we have to look up, where

01:18:00.640 --> 01:18:02.320
Francis Steen is, but he had this thing.

01:18:02.400 --> 01:18:06.240
I remember he would talk, he gave a talk when I was a grad student at UCSB, where he talked

01:18:06.240 --> 01:18:10.480
about how if you think about what you do when you play with your kid, most of it is

01:18:10.480 --> 01:18:11.120
predation.

01:18:11.430 --> 01:18:14.950
So like if you tickle your child, I even I'm so acutely aware of this.

01:18:15.030 --> 01:18:18.470
And this is like this is like real-time prediction of like what would be the most

01:18:18.470 --> 01:18:22.710
vulnerable parts of my child, and like you know, it's like belly and like like and that is

01:18:22.710 --> 01:18:24.790
like my son laughs hysterically, right?

01:18:24.950 --> 01:18:29.590
And it's like it's play around like sort of like preventing predation or like you know,

01:18:29.670 --> 01:18:30.950
like chasing after a kid.

01:18:31.030 --> 01:18:36.320
Like what what adults naturally do is pretend it's ratcheted down

01:18:36.320 --> 01:18:37.200
predation.

01:18:37.520 --> 01:18:43.120
And that's like what what like a human universal of sort of like adult child play that

01:18:43.120 --> 01:18:44.800
involves like huge laughter.

01:18:44.960 --> 01:18:50.400
So I think it's a very mature view of the world to sort of be like danger and

01:18:50.560 --> 01:18:56.080
hazards and like really the the the morbid part of life is really also part of like the

01:18:56.080 --> 01:18:57.760
hilarity and joy of life too.

01:18:58.320 --> 01:19:00.400
It's like you don't have to choose between them.

01:19:00.480 --> 01:19:06.050
And it's okay to give people who are anxious or scared or feel underpowered like

01:19:06.290 --> 01:19:10.850
fiction or like or give them like stories that might feel unsafe.

01:19:11.010 --> 01:19:15.490
Like I think this this notion that we need to keep people safe from the bad things in life,

01:19:15.730 --> 01:19:19.250
it really sounds like what you're saying is that that's super counterproductive or maybe

01:19:19.250 --> 01:19:20.130
counterproductive.

01:19:20.450 --> 01:19:22.530
Yeah, there's a good uh Neil Gaiman quote.

01:19:22.610 --> 01:19:25.940
And I don't know if he and I'll probably butcher it a little bit because I don't have it in

01:19:25.940 --> 01:19:28.260
front of me, but I I think he pulled it from somewhere else too.

01:19:28.420 --> 01:19:32.740
Anyway, the idea it was something along the lines of um, you know, stories aren't great

01:19:32.740 --> 01:19:36.340
because they tell kids dragons exist, they're great because they tell them how to slay the

01:19:36.340 --> 01:19:37.300
dragon, right?

01:19:37.540 --> 01:19:41.220
Right like horror stories aren't great because they tell you they it's not aren't great

01:19:41.220 --> 01:19:43.620
because they tell you how awful things they can can be.

01:19:43.780 --> 01:19:46.660
They're you know good because they tell you how to overcome those awful things.

01:19:48.350 --> 01:19:53.790
Or in the case of many horror stories, what to avoid to uh what to not do to avoid

01:19:53.790 --> 01:19:55.150
succumbing to those awful things.

01:19:55.310 --> 01:19:55.790
Yeah.

01:19:56.430 --> 01:20:00.830
So you you have some really interesting empirical evidence for for this hypothesis that

01:20:00.910 --> 01:20:03.630
that horror helps us deal with awful things.

01:20:03.790 --> 01:20:07.070
So um I'm thinking of your paper about um pandemics.

01:20:07.310 --> 01:20:12.830
And so this was uh uh during the COVID pandemic, um you looked at whether people had

01:20:12.830 --> 01:20:18.620
watched horror movies about pandemics and you looked to see whether whether people who had

01:20:18.620 --> 01:20:23.500
watched those horror movies about pandemics how they uh fared during the pandemic compared

01:20:23.500 --> 01:20:26.140
to people who had not consumed those those movies.

01:20:26.220 --> 01:20:27.660
So what what did you find there?

01:20:28.060 --> 01:20:33.980
Yeah I mean uh that came in part I was bummed because when the pandemic hit like

01:20:33.980 --> 01:20:37.740
everyone else all my in person stuff had to stop and I had this really great study with

01:20:37.740 --> 01:20:41.500
like a cabinet of morbid curiosities I devised and it was an eye tracking study.

01:20:41.580 --> 01:20:44.190
It was like the study I was most excited about in my PhD.

01:20:44.270 --> 01:20:47.310
And I got, you know, essentially canceled because of that.

01:20:47.470 --> 01:20:52.590
Um, but it ended up being uh, you know, good a good thing in some ways because I got this

01:20:52.590 --> 01:20:55.550
idea about, well, if I'm in a pandemic, it's kind of a scary thing.

01:20:55.710 --> 01:20:56.590
Everybody's experiencing it.

01:20:56.830 --> 01:21:01.630
I wonder if that's related to morbid curiosity and uh and coping and sort of scary play.

01:21:01.790 --> 01:21:03.760
And so I ran this like very simple study.

01:21:03.840 --> 01:21:08.000
It was not, you know, the study that I was doing was like comp it was like methodologically

01:21:08.000 --> 01:21:08.480
complex.

01:21:08.560 --> 01:21:09.840
It had a lot of moving parts.

01:21:09.920 --> 01:21:11.040
It was interesting.

01:21:11.280 --> 01:21:15.440
This was just like an online study with people who are experiencing a thing in the world

01:21:15.440 --> 01:21:18.320
and measuring their psychological resilience and some of their traits.

01:21:18.640 --> 01:21:20.320
It was like a very straightforward study.

01:21:20.640 --> 01:21:24.240
But it's what I could do during the pandemic, especially in those early months of like

01:21:24.240 --> 01:21:26.720
April and May of 2020.

01:21:26.880 --> 01:21:32.850
And um yeah, I found that people who were horror fans, even after controlling four big five

01:21:32.850 --> 01:21:38.610
personality traits, income, gender, age, uh, they were more likely to be um

01:21:39.250 --> 01:21:44.690
have to to report higher psychological resilience to uh the early months of the pandemic

01:21:44.770 --> 01:21:47.890
when when things were very unknown and the world actually was like pretty scary.

01:21:48.050 --> 01:21:52.210
Like in in April, when they were like, hey, we have a global pandemic for the first time in

01:21:52.240 --> 01:21:55.760
a long time, probably in anyone's lifetime that's living.

01:21:56.000 --> 01:21:59.360
Um, horror fans were doing a little better than other people.

01:21:59.520 --> 01:22:03.680
Uh, we also found that people who had seen just one pandemic movie didn't have to have

01:22:03.680 --> 01:22:06.080
watched a hundred or five of them or whatever.

01:22:06.240 --> 01:22:10.640
If you had just seen one pandemic movie, you were more likely to be more resilient, uh,

01:22:10.800 --> 01:22:14.990
psychologically resilient, sort of exhibit signs of psychological resilience to the to the

01:22:14.990 --> 01:22:15.550
pandemic.

01:22:15.630 --> 01:22:20.110
Um and then of course people who scored high and treat warm curiosity, again, controlling

01:22:20.350 --> 01:22:26.270
for things like extroversion, conscientiousness, even neuroticism, um, income, age, gender,

01:22:26.350 --> 01:22:30.350
uh, they were more likely to be to experience positive resilience in the face of the

01:22:30.350 --> 01:22:31.230
pandemic.

01:22:31.790 --> 01:22:32.270
That's awesome.

01:22:32.430 --> 01:22:36.350
So what so let's I I want to unpack what what you mean by psychological resilience.

01:22:36.430 --> 01:22:37.550
So what what what is that?

01:22:37.710 --> 01:22:38.670
How did you measure it?

01:22:38.990 --> 01:22:40.670
Yeah, there's there's a lot of ways to measure that.

01:22:40.750 --> 01:22:46.220
And I, you know, um it's hard to do with a short questionnaire, regardless of how you do

01:22:46.220 --> 01:22:46.780
it, right?

01:22:46.940 --> 01:22:51.820
Um, but there were a ton of uh resilience scales, even even to like uh disasters.

01:22:51.900 --> 01:22:54.860
There were like disaster resilience scales that were out there.

01:22:55.100 --> 01:22:59.500
The problem is a lot of those are a lot of disasters are one time events, a tornado, a

01:22:59.500 --> 01:23:03.900
hurricane, a fire, an earthquake, um, you know, a mass shooting, whatever it might be.

01:23:03.980 --> 01:23:05.260
They're like these one time events.

01:23:05.340 --> 01:23:09.180
And it's like, how are you coping with this a week later, a month later, a year later?

01:23:09.340 --> 01:23:13.570
With the pandemic, it was like this ongoing thing that, you know, we were getting new

01:23:13.570 --> 01:23:16.530
information every day, but it was becoming more confusing by the day.

01:23:16.690 --> 01:23:19.250
Um, so there wasn't a good scale that captured that.

01:23:19.330 --> 01:23:23.010
And so we took, we took kind of the good items, the items that worked from these validated

01:23:23.010 --> 01:23:27.330
resilience scales of, you know, are you losing sleep uh more than usual?

01:23:27.490 --> 01:23:29.090
Are you feeling more anxious than usual?

01:23:29.170 --> 01:23:31.170
Are you feeling more depressed than usual?

01:23:31.330 --> 01:23:33.410
Um, how how are you feeling about the future?

01:23:33.490 --> 01:23:37.720
Are you feeling positive about your, you capabilities of uh succeeding in the future?

01:23:37.880 --> 01:23:41.640
Uh, we took some of those items that were good and we added a few more or changed the

01:23:41.640 --> 01:23:46.600
wording a little bit if it was if it seemed like it was uh too pinpointed to a one-time

01:23:46.600 --> 01:23:49.720
event to make it like in the past week, how have you felt right?

01:23:49.880 --> 01:23:53.960
And then we ran a study in April and we ran one again a month later with the same

01:23:53.960 --> 01:23:59.800
participants in uh in May, and um found that again, people who were horror

01:23:59.800 --> 01:24:04.490
fans or more really curious were not losing as much sleep, not feeling as anxious, not

01:24:04.490 --> 01:24:07.770
feeling as depressed, feeling optimistic about the future.

01:24:08.010 --> 01:24:12.330
Um, just generally having, I guess, like, I don't want to say a positive attitude about it,

01:24:12.410 --> 01:24:17.690
but they were just like less um affected by things that everyone was being affected by with

01:24:17.690 --> 01:24:21.770
the pandemic that made their life miserable, like being being locked in your apartment or

01:24:21.770 --> 01:24:25.610
your house for weeks at a time and not know what's not knowing what's going on in general,

01:24:25.690 --> 01:24:28.170
uh, the kind of anxiety that that induces.

01:24:29.180 --> 01:24:29.500
Hmm.

01:24:29.660 --> 01:24:30.220
Interesting.

01:24:30.380 --> 01:24:35.900
I mean, do you think what's going on there is that um people who have thought about or or

01:24:35.900 --> 01:24:41.740
consumed fiction about pandemics, they have a greater sense of like number one, what it is,

01:24:41.900 --> 01:24:45.420
how bad is it, how to deal with it, what they should be doing.

01:24:45.580 --> 01:24:51.570
And that knowledge um makes them feel better about it, that they can better navigate

01:24:51.570 --> 01:24:51.730
it.

01:24:51.810 --> 01:24:54.050
If if things got worse, they would know what to do.

01:24:54.290 --> 01:24:59.890
Whereas if you if you know nothing about what's going on, um you just kind of

01:24:59.890 --> 01:25:05.650
default to panic and you're just trying to and and you you get into this generalized

01:25:05.650 --> 01:25:09.090
anxiety state where something bad is happening and you don't understand it and you don't

01:25:09.090 --> 01:25:09.970
know what to do about it.

01:25:10.050 --> 01:25:13.090
And you're just trying to grope at something, anything you could learn or something,

01:25:13.170 --> 01:25:14.050
anything you could do.

01:25:14.210 --> 01:25:18.360
But but presumably the people who have practiced uh thinking about these things in a safe

01:25:18.360 --> 01:25:22.840
context, they will will have already learned things and already know something about what

01:25:22.840 --> 01:25:23.720
they could be doing.

01:25:23.800 --> 01:25:26.600
Uh and that and that makes them manage the situation better.

01:25:26.920 --> 01:25:27.800
I think that's exactly right.

01:25:27.880 --> 01:25:29.400
I think there I think there are two things going on.

01:25:29.480 --> 01:25:30.760
I think that's one of the main ones, right?

01:25:30.840 --> 01:25:34.280
And that's such a simple thing that you could come up with without doing a study.

01:25:34.520 --> 01:25:38.230
So like intuition, you could say, like, oh yeah, well, knowing what a pandemic is like

01:25:38.230 --> 01:25:39.190
helps you deal with the pandemic.

01:25:39.270 --> 01:25:42.230
But it's like, that's actually a really important insight if it's like, well, they watched

01:25:42.230 --> 01:25:44.790
the movie Contagion and now they feel better about a real thing that's happening.

01:25:44.870 --> 01:25:50.390
Like that's an important insight for uh this idea that that scary stories can actually help

01:25:50.390 --> 01:25:52.390
us deal with things in the real world, right?

01:25:52.630 --> 01:25:56.550
Um, and one that hadn't been shown in any kind of way that I could find.

01:25:56.710 --> 01:26:00.070
I think the other thing that was going on is what we talked about a moment ago of uh

01:26:00.230 --> 01:26:05.510
particularly with with horror fans, um, they or morbidly curious people, they uh

01:26:06.620 --> 01:26:11.260
have practiced, implicitly practiced feeling anxious and feeling afraid in a lot of

01:26:11.260 --> 01:26:12.140
different scenarios.

01:26:12.380 --> 01:26:16.060
And so they might be a little bit better at just regulating, they might be feeling those

01:26:16.060 --> 01:26:19.020
feelings of anxiety, but they might be a little better at regulating them than the average

01:26:19.020 --> 01:26:22.220
person or than someone who's not morbidly curious at all or does never watches horror

01:26:22.220 --> 01:26:22.620
movies.

01:26:23.260 --> 01:26:27.580
Yeah, can we translate for one of the things and we do, because we're evolutionary

01:26:27.580 --> 01:26:31.580
psychologists, is sort of translating these intuitive constructs into sort of software

01:26:31.660 --> 01:26:32.380
level descriptions.

01:26:32.460 --> 01:26:36.930
This is this is a hard ass, but like when when we're talking about emotion regulation or of

01:26:36.930 --> 01:26:40.690
able to regulate, um, do you have a thought or either of you?

01:26:40.850 --> 01:26:45.170
I mean, I I have thoughts too, but like can we think about sort of what what that what does

01:26:45.170 --> 01:26:48.370
that mean, sort of in terms of like the underlying software?

01:26:48.690 --> 01:26:54.530
I think um off the cuff, I would say like let's just look at

01:26:54.530 --> 01:26:57.170
anxiety, because that's normally what we're talking about with these kinds of things.

01:26:57.330 --> 01:26:59.250
Though there's a lot of different emotions you could regulate.

01:26:59.330 --> 01:27:02.930
That's typically the one that if you go to therapy, you're trying to regulate.

01:27:03.090 --> 01:27:08.320
Um a lot of what that is, is uh like mechanistically, there's um

01:27:09.200 --> 01:27:12.800
thinking about uh re reappraising the situation, right?

01:27:12.960 --> 01:27:17.760
So I guess at a software level, like taking a second pass using a different algorithm and

01:27:17.760 --> 01:27:22.160
seeing if uh if what you're really experiencing is really what as bad as you think it is.

01:27:22.480 --> 01:27:27.360
There's um sort of mistaking facts for feelings is something that a lot of anxious people

01:27:27.360 --> 01:27:31.390
do where they say, like, if it feels this bad, it must be that bad.

01:27:31.870 --> 01:27:36.110
And so reevaluating that and saying, like, well, just because it feels this bad, like I'm

01:27:36.110 --> 01:27:40.030
watching a scary movie and I'm feeling really terrified, but nothing bad is happening.

01:27:40.270 --> 01:27:43.710
So again, kind of a reevaluation of of what's going on.

01:27:43.870 --> 01:27:47.870
Um, and then there's kind of just a dampening of feelings of anxiety.

01:27:47.950 --> 01:27:52.350
And I don't know what that would look like from uh like a software analogy, but kind of uh

01:27:52.430 --> 01:27:55.310
I guess requiring a larger input, maybe.

01:27:55.550 --> 01:28:01.140
Um, though I think that's that's it's not quite right, but something like that, where it's

01:28:01.140 --> 01:28:04.420
like, you know, you're essentially you're receiving the input, um, but there's kind of a

01:28:04.420 --> 01:28:08.740
filter you're passing it through saying, like, you know, for every two bits I get, only

01:28:08.740 --> 01:28:13.780
give me one bit of information or something, um, where you're dampening that signal because

01:28:13.780 --> 01:28:15.940
you know consciously that it's not as bad.

01:28:16.020 --> 01:28:19.060
You're mistaking your facts for feelings or feelings for facts.

01:28:19.220 --> 01:28:21.270
Um, but I'd I'd be curious to hear what you think.

01:28:21.350 --> 01:28:25.350
Because I I hadn't thought about that about emotion regulation from that sort of software

01:28:25.350 --> 01:28:25.750
perspective.

01:28:26.150 --> 01:28:26.310
Yeah.

01:28:26.550 --> 01:28:27.430
What do you think, David?

01:28:29.510 --> 01:28:30.950
So that's interesting.

01:28:31.110 --> 01:28:36.630
So the way I'm starting to think of it now, just in this moment talking to you,

01:28:36.950 --> 01:28:42.870
is that um there when you're stressed or anxious, um, your your body starts producing

01:28:42.870 --> 01:28:45.900
cortisol, which you know fills you with energy, you know.

01:28:45.980 --> 01:28:50.300
Uh um so it it's uh it's it's preparing you to deal with with with with whatever

01:28:50.300 --> 01:28:52.700
physiologically demanding threat is in front of you.

01:28:52.860 --> 01:28:56.380
But there is a kind of computational problem where there where where you have to figure

01:28:56.380 --> 01:28:58.780
out, well, how much energy do I need?

01:28:58.940 --> 01:29:00.140
How bad is this threat?

01:29:00.300 --> 01:29:02.460
How much cortisol should I release?

01:29:02.620 --> 01:29:05.020
Uh and there's a lot that's an inherently computational problem.

01:29:05.180 --> 01:29:09.670
You have to learn things uh uh about your environment, you have to process all all the

01:29:09.670 --> 01:29:13.110
different cues, you have to reason about uh the the different cues.

01:29:13.350 --> 01:29:16.870
Uh and and so there are many ways that you could get that problem wrong.

01:29:17.110 --> 01:29:21.350
You could produce too much cortisol and and mobilize too much energy, which is wasting a

01:29:21.350 --> 01:29:25.990
really metabolically critical resource, or you could not burn enough energy uh when when

01:29:25.990 --> 01:29:28.150
you really need it to deal with this situation.

01:29:28.230 --> 01:29:33.680
And so you could think of emotion regulas regulation as just trying to get the balance

01:29:33.680 --> 01:29:33.920
right.

01:29:34.000 --> 01:29:38.560
So you're learning about what the threat is, how bad it, how bad it is, how much energy you

01:29:38.560 --> 01:29:43.120
need to deal with it, you know, what are the the types of things you need to uh what what

01:29:43.120 --> 01:29:49.040
are the cognitive uh uh um processes that need to be activated to deal with

01:29:49.040 --> 01:29:50.000
this threat.

01:29:50.160 --> 01:29:53.010
Um and and that's sort of what I think of.

01:29:53.170 --> 01:29:56.290
So the the more frequently you deal with the threat, the more you learn about it, the more

01:29:56.290 --> 01:29:58.930
you de the more you understand like, you know, how bad is it?

01:29:59.010 --> 01:30:00.290
How much energy do I need to burn?

01:30:00.450 --> 01:30:01.490
What do I need to be thinking about?

01:30:01.570 --> 01:30:03.170
What are the steps I need to be taking?

01:30:03.410 --> 01:30:06.770
Um that that's sort of how I'm starting to think of it right now.

01:30:06.850 --> 01:30:08.130
Do you do you buy that?

01:30:09.090 --> 01:30:09.570
Uh yeah.

01:30:09.650 --> 01:30:11.250
I mean, I think that's essentially right, right?

01:30:11.330 --> 01:30:15.560
It's kind of this again, I think there's the you know, you can receive as input, uh,

01:30:15.640 --> 01:30:19.480
physiological signals and and and perceptions of things.

01:30:19.560 --> 01:30:23.560
Uh, but there's also this like you, you know, humans are really good at receiving as input

01:30:23.640 --> 01:30:27.080
their own imaginations and imagining, like, well, wait a minute, what about this?

01:30:27.160 --> 01:30:31.400
Like like counterexamples, then that can serve as its own input into these to to put the

01:30:31.400 --> 01:30:34.600
brakes on these kind of things, put the brakes on the cortisol production, on your

01:30:34.600 --> 01:30:38.200
adrenaline production, on your general sympathetic arousal.

01:30:38.360 --> 01:30:43.750
Um so probably what it is is this kind of top down, like second, second screening or second

01:30:43.750 --> 01:30:47.110
viewing of what's going on, and then receiving input from that, almost like running two

01:30:47.110 --> 01:30:51.510
experiments, like the experiment of how I'm feeling, like, well, I'm feeling this way.

01:30:51.590 --> 01:30:53.590
So that's some input that something is wrong.

01:30:53.830 --> 01:30:58.470
But then you can kind of run this other imaginary experiment of like, well, I'm also

01:30:58.470 --> 01:31:02.710
sitting on my couch and that thing's on a TV, and that's getting its own input into those

01:31:02.710 --> 01:31:08.040
same mechanisms, that the same threat management mechanisms that's probably dampening some

01:31:08.040 --> 01:31:08.280
of that.

01:31:08.360 --> 01:31:13.720
And I think you can learn to exercise a little bit of, I guess, control uh over flipping

01:31:13.720 --> 01:31:16.120
that a second screening on or off.

01:31:16.360 --> 01:31:16.520
Yeah.

01:31:17.000 --> 01:31:18.360
Here's here's another hypothesis.

01:31:18.440 --> 01:31:19.800
I'm curious what you think about this.

01:31:19.960 --> 01:31:25.880
Um, could it be that uh with with anxiety um and fear that

01:31:25.880 --> 01:31:31.630
there is a vulnerability for positive feedback loops to to start happening.

01:31:31.790 --> 01:31:36.030
So, like when you put a microphone in front of a speaker, you get that shrill, piercing

01:31:36.030 --> 01:31:39.310
sound because the sound comes out of the speaker and goes into the microphone, which gets

01:31:39.310 --> 01:31:43.070
amplified, which goes back into the microphone, which gets amplified again until the sound

01:31:43.070 --> 01:31:45.870
grows to this horrible shrieking sound.

01:31:46.510 --> 01:31:52.110
But uh it could be that there are similar kinds of feedback processes to the inputs and

01:31:52.110 --> 01:31:53.310
outputs of an emotion.

01:31:53.390 --> 01:31:58.750
So the outputs of an emotion could be in some circumstances perceived as an input to that

01:31:58.750 --> 01:31:59.800
same emotion.

01:31:59.960 --> 01:32:04.440
So one of the outputs of fear is physiological arousal, but physiological arousal could

01:32:04.440 --> 01:32:05.720
also be an input to fear.

01:32:05.800 --> 01:32:11.240
It could be a cue that, you know, um uh something wrong is happening with your body.

01:32:11.400 --> 01:32:15.320
You know, a lot of symptoms of you know pathogens or illness or poisoning can cause

01:32:15.320 --> 01:32:16.920
physiological arousals.

01:32:17.080 --> 01:32:22.840
You know, feeling feverish, you know, the uh is is, you know, one example of how uh you uh

01:32:22.920 --> 01:32:26.710
physiological arousal could be um uh a cue of danger itself.

01:32:26.870 --> 01:32:31.990
You mentioned how people mistake facts for feelings where they use their physiological

01:32:31.990 --> 01:32:35.750
arousal as a cue that something is really dangerous in the environment, which could then

01:32:35.750 --> 01:32:39.750
increase the physiological arousal, which could increase the cue that something dangerous

01:32:39.750 --> 01:32:42.310
is happening and you could get into a kind of feedback loop there.

01:32:42.470 --> 01:32:47.350
And so it could be that because the inputs to our emotions are so complex and

01:32:47.350 --> 01:32:52.630
contextualized, that the input can often become the output, which becomes the input, which

01:32:52.630 --> 01:32:53.590
becomes the output.

01:32:53.830 --> 01:32:59.080
And what it means to regulate an emotion is to figure out when you're getting into those

01:32:59.080 --> 01:33:04.040
kinds of feedback loops uh and and avoid getting into them so that you can uh uh harness

01:33:04.200 --> 01:33:06.440
the emotion more effectively and and practically.

01:33:06.600 --> 01:33:07.960
Does that do you buy that?

01:33:08.680 --> 01:33:09.400
Yeah, I think so.

01:33:09.560 --> 01:33:12.280
I mean, I think that uh that seems essentially correct.

01:33:12.440 --> 01:33:17.480
I think there are a lot of reasons why, like you said, input uh outputs of something like

01:33:17.480 --> 01:33:23.070
fear, the common outputs of it, the physiological outputs, um, the c even the cognitive

01:33:23.070 --> 01:33:26.670
outputs, uh, should serve as inputs for fear, right?

01:33:26.830 --> 01:33:32.110
Because our bodies are quicker to detect uh our bodies and minds are are quickly detect

01:33:32.110 --> 01:33:34.990
things sometimes before our conscious awareness grabs onto them.

01:33:35.150 --> 01:33:41.070
You know, you think about uh just like those studies with like millisecond reactions to

01:33:41.070 --> 01:33:44.190
whatever angry faces or snakes or all kinds of other things.

01:33:44.270 --> 01:33:48.300
Um we react very quickly and and subconsciously to threats.

01:33:48.380 --> 01:33:53.740
And then if that gets ratcheted, if that turns on the threat management, the vigilance, um,

01:33:54.220 --> 01:33:58.220
before we can really catch it, then that serves as its own input like, hey, something is

01:33:58.220 --> 01:33:59.740
wrong, but I don't see what it is yet.

01:33:59.900 --> 01:34:03.500
Let me turn up my vigilance more, let me turn up my uh my fear more.

01:34:03.580 --> 01:34:08.460
And you just get in this like cycle, like you said, of uh, well, if if I'm being activated

01:34:08.460 --> 01:34:10.300
this much, something must be wrong.

01:34:10.540 --> 01:34:14.860
And it's really hard to kind of push the brakes on that or provide a secondary input that

01:34:14.860 --> 01:34:16.540
would downregulate that.

01:34:16.930 --> 01:34:17.250
Yeah.

01:34:17.650 --> 01:34:21.170
Just to sort of resummarize, I think what what we're all saying, or what you guys are

01:34:21.170 --> 01:34:24.610
saying, is that, and this is sort of the way I think about it, is you know, because we're

01:34:24.610 --> 01:34:29.970
so we have such a complicated cognitive architecture, one of the problems is this sort of

01:34:29.970 --> 01:34:35.650
problem of like relevance of sort of like of all the machinery, which machinery should be

01:34:35.650 --> 01:34:37.810
used for any particular task or event.

01:34:38.040 --> 01:34:41.400
And one of the problems is not often too little, but too many systems.

01:34:41.560 --> 01:34:44.360
So, for example, I'm sure both of you have had this experience of like if you're

01:34:44.360 --> 01:34:48.520
performing, you get really nervous and scared and you do worse, right?

01:34:48.680 --> 01:34:52.200
Because I'm not just thinking about catching the ball or like singing the song.

01:34:52.440 --> 01:34:56.200
I'm worried about what people are going to think about me.

01:34:56.280 --> 01:34:57.960
I'm noticing the people's reaction.

01:34:58.040 --> 01:35:00.360
If I'm teaching it, I'm noticing the students' reaction.

01:35:00.520 --> 01:35:06.290
And so a lot of sort of like getting better at things is sort of running through

01:35:06.290 --> 01:35:11.730
this system of there's a system that's sort of like corraling different cognitive

01:35:11.730 --> 01:35:13.490
systems for this task.

01:35:13.650 --> 01:35:19.170
And then it's sort of this sampling of like, if we, if we were, if we take the system out,

01:35:19.410 --> 01:35:20.850
do we do better or worse?

01:35:21.090 --> 01:35:27.090
You know, and I think some of fear and some of what we're talking about is um

01:35:27.700 --> 01:35:33.060
what a emotional regulation is is that process right where it's sort of like you in this

01:35:33.140 --> 01:35:39.140
also people talk about this in in real context of if you automate things so you

01:35:39.140 --> 01:35:43.540
know people who respond to really life or death situations like a lifeguard or police

01:35:43.540 --> 01:35:48.740
officer or the military or like um or even like you know I used to wrestle you know like

01:35:48.820 --> 01:35:54.610
you would just do these things where a lot of times if somebody is like in a situation

01:35:54.610 --> 01:35:59.410
where there's a natural disaster or somebody shooting at you, people don't respond well.

01:35:59.570 --> 01:36:03.250
And the reason why is because it's quote unquote taking them a long time to process what's

01:36:03.250 --> 01:36:04.930
happening and what to do about it.

01:36:05.170 --> 01:36:11.170
And so what you want to do is practice or train ahead of time to automate these are the

01:36:11.170 --> 01:36:16.320
systems, this is the set of algorithms to turn on in this situation.

01:36:16.560 --> 01:36:22.560
And what anxiety is, or what emotional regulation is, is that system or that procedure for

01:36:22.560 --> 01:36:28.160
sort of figuring out which cocktail or which combination of systems

01:36:28.480 --> 01:36:31.760
are the sweet spot for this kind of situation.

01:36:32.080 --> 01:36:37.840
And the thing about worrying about the crowd when you're singing or trying to catch the

01:36:37.840 --> 01:36:41.050
ball is you're too nervous, right?

01:36:41.130 --> 01:36:47.050
And that's like, and then so like what that regulation system is doing is snipping out uh

01:36:47.210 --> 01:36:48.010
worrying about that.

01:36:48.090 --> 01:36:49.450
And then it becomes automated.

01:36:49.530 --> 01:36:53.690
That uh that extra like corraling system sort of turns off or gets good at it.

01:36:53.770 --> 01:36:55.450
And then it's like we're good enough at this.

01:36:55.530 --> 01:36:58.810
That's that I think that's maybe a way of summarizing what we're talking about in software

01:36:58.890 --> 01:36:59.530
level terms.

01:36:59.850 --> 01:37:00.010
Yeah.

01:37:00.090 --> 01:37:04.000
And I think that goes back to what I'd mentioned earlier about it's really hard to actively

01:37:04.160 --> 01:37:05.840
worry about two things at once.

01:37:06.080 --> 01:37:06.480
Right.

01:37:06.720 --> 01:37:10.000
And so you're either worrying about what people are thinking about you when you're

01:37:10.000 --> 01:37:13.440
performing, or you're worrying about like what you need to be doing to perform well.

01:37:13.520 --> 01:37:13.760
Right.

01:37:13.920 --> 01:37:14.160
Right.

01:37:14.320 --> 01:37:17.360
And if you're if you're doing the former, you're probably going to mess up.

01:37:17.440 --> 01:37:20.720
You're not going to perform as well as you as you should be doing because you can't focus

01:37:20.720 --> 01:37:24.480
on that because you're too consumed by the worry of what people are going to think, or what

01:37:24.480 --> 01:37:26.720
happens if you fail, or what happens if you forget to do something.

01:37:27.050 --> 01:37:27.290
That's right.

01:37:27.370 --> 01:37:27.530
Yeah.

01:37:27.690 --> 01:37:31.770
No, I think that description of sort of like I'm distracted or I'm worried about something

01:37:31.770 --> 01:37:37.210
else is the experience of that software system not being calibrated right yet.

01:37:37.290 --> 01:37:37.530
Yeah.

01:37:38.090 --> 01:37:38.330
Yeah.

01:37:38.410 --> 01:37:43.370
You're learning what to worry about and how worried you should be about it.

01:37:43.610 --> 01:37:45.130
I think is one way to do that.

01:37:45.370 --> 01:37:50.960
And I think playing with fearful things and putting yourself in in situations where you're

01:37:51.120 --> 01:37:55.440
you're getting inputs that you're worried, whether that's like spinning around in circles

01:37:55.440 --> 01:37:59.120
quickly or climbing a tree as a kid or playing tag or being chased by someone or watching a

01:37:59.120 --> 01:38:02.480
scary movie or going through a haunted house, there are a lot of different ways to get that

01:38:02.480 --> 01:38:02.960
feeling.

01:38:03.120 --> 01:38:06.480
I think that they work particularly well when they're embedded in a story because we tend

01:38:06.480 --> 01:38:07.920
to be kind of narrative creatures first.

01:38:08.320 --> 01:38:11.680
Like every other creature on earth experiences things first person.

01:38:11.760 --> 01:38:15.200
And so our minds, I think, are, and I think Steen might have actually been the person who

01:38:15.200 --> 01:38:15.440
said this.

01:38:15.600 --> 01:38:20.630
I think it was a Steen and Owens paper that our minds are are just phylogenetically, I

01:38:20.630 --> 01:38:25.270
mean, we are really good at um figuring things out when they're in a first person

01:38:25.350 --> 01:38:28.950
narrative, which is probably why stories are compelling and why we can learn really well

01:38:28.950 --> 01:38:31.430
from stories and don't learn very well from facts.

01:38:32.070 --> 01:38:37.270
Because every other piece of machinery in the human brain for millions of years is adapted

01:38:37.270 --> 01:38:38.950
to learning things first person.

01:38:39.110 --> 01:38:39.270
Right.

01:38:39.430 --> 01:38:44.280
And so when you tell a really good first person story and you embed lessons in it, we learn

01:38:44.280 --> 01:38:45.560
it really easily and really quickly.

01:38:45.640 --> 01:38:46.920
And we don't even feel like we're learning.

01:38:47.000 --> 01:38:48.200
It just is enjoyable.

01:38:48.360 --> 01:38:48.520
Right.

01:38:48.760 --> 01:38:54.680
I think that's why uh horror is somewhat uniquely suited for teaching us

01:38:54.680 --> 01:38:58.120
how to feel afraid and feel anxious and overcome those feelings.

01:38:59.480 --> 01:38:59.800
Yeah.

01:38:59.880 --> 01:39:04.410
It's almost like, you know, we we tend to think of learning as as solely about learning a

01:39:04.410 --> 01:39:08.650
list of facts, but there's another, perhaps even more important kind of learning, which is

01:39:08.650 --> 01:39:13.450
how to uh regulate and organize and arrange your emotions, right?

01:39:13.530 --> 01:39:18.250
Because that's because there's no way that natural c selection can know in advance like the

01:39:18.250 --> 01:39:22.730
exact right configuration of all of your cognitive and physiological and motivational

01:39:22.730 --> 01:39:25.770
states, uh, you know, that is that is correct for the situation you're in.

01:39:25.850 --> 01:39:26.410
You have to learn.

01:39:26.570 --> 01:39:30.330
You have to learn about the situation and and and and sort of take stuff out, sample

01:39:30.330 --> 01:39:31.850
different parts of it, as Dave said.

01:39:32.020 --> 01:39:35.780
Uh, and so emotions themselves, we like to think of it as sort of the opposite of reason

01:39:35.780 --> 01:39:36.340
and learning.

01:39:36.500 --> 01:39:39.860
But I think emotions also need to need practical experience.

01:39:39.940 --> 01:39:44.260
You need to learn how to deal with them and how to organize them uh in response to uh

01:39:44.260 --> 01:39:49.140
particular context, uh, which I think is is a really important lesson from your work.

01:39:49.540 --> 01:39:52.740
Yeah, well, and and I think that's a general lesson, probably, from evolutionary

01:39:52.740 --> 01:39:58.350
psychology, just that uh emotions are many times ecologically rational.

01:39:58.510 --> 01:40:01.950
And if you can understand that ecological ecological rationality, you understand when it

01:40:01.950 --> 01:40:05.550
goes wrong or when it misfires, when it shouldn't, especially, you know, we're living, it's

01:40:05.550 --> 01:40:09.790
not that's not a not not my idea, obviously, but we're living in a very different world

01:40:09.790 --> 01:40:13.950
than what our ancestors lived in for most of their history, right?

01:40:14.030 --> 01:40:18.750
And so um there are going to be some mismatches when it comes to, in particular, uh, you

01:40:18.750 --> 01:40:24.600
know, these uh emotion systems that evolved under um fairly similar

01:40:24.600 --> 01:40:28.280
circumstances for you know tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of

01:40:28.280 --> 01:40:28.840
years.

01:40:29.160 --> 01:40:29.400
Yeah.

01:40:29.560 --> 01:40:32.680
And people often talk about it's scary to confront your emotions.

01:40:32.760 --> 01:40:35.000
And I wonder if it's the same underlying logic, right?

01:40:35.080 --> 01:40:39.720
Where it's it's a similar thing where it's sort of like um in in the same way, maybe we

01:40:39.720 --> 01:40:44.280
shouldn't let kids avoid all risk or scary things.

01:40:44.440 --> 01:40:50.360
You know, maybe one point is that um, you know, uh be let let like feel

01:40:50.360 --> 01:40:55.970
emotions and sort of uh don't run away from that that feeling, right?

01:40:59.010 --> 01:40:59.250
Yeah.

01:40:59.410 --> 01:41:05.170
And I think um there's this common, I don't know if it's like actually what therapists tell

01:41:05.170 --> 01:41:08.610
people or if it's what you know people on social media say therapists say.

01:41:08.770 --> 01:41:13.250
Um but you know, you should you should feel your feelings and you should um but but there's

01:41:13.330 --> 01:41:18.460
there's a pretty big leap from you should feel your feelings and understand what they are

01:41:18.620 --> 01:41:21.180
from that to that means they are okay, right?

01:41:21.340 --> 01:41:23.660
Because then you fall into that trap of mistaking feelings for facts.

01:41:23.740 --> 01:41:28.380
And it's like, because I felt this, I am justified in behaving this way or feeling this way

01:41:28.460 --> 01:41:29.580
or reacting in this way.

01:41:29.660 --> 01:41:31.820
And it's like, that's not quite what that should mean.

01:41:31.900 --> 01:41:35.660
What it should mean is that you should feel the feeling, understand what it is, try to

01:41:35.660 --> 01:41:40.300
understand why it happened and like, and then the next and crucial step is kind of what we

01:41:40.300 --> 01:41:42.460
talked about here with their emotion regulation.

01:41:42.970 --> 01:41:44.250
is that how I should be feeling?

01:41:44.330 --> 01:41:45.610
Is that the best response I could have?

01:41:45.690 --> 01:41:46.890
And if not, how can I change that?

01:41:47.050 --> 01:41:50.330
How what parts can I take in and out or turn on and off to kind of adjust that?

01:41:50.570 --> 01:41:50.730
Yeah.

01:41:50.810 --> 01:41:54.810
Are there people, do you know, are there people sort of in evolutionary psychiatry?

01:41:55.290 --> 01:42:01.290
Um, uh, where so I mean, I think knowing about what the function of emotions are is a

01:42:01.290 --> 01:42:04.650
way to sort of distance the emotion from your own experience.

01:42:04.730 --> 01:42:07.850
And then it, or at least it gives you something of like, so for example, we talked about

01:42:07.850 --> 01:42:12.580
what anxiety, what the function of anxiety is, and maybe even knowing that information the

01:42:12.580 --> 01:42:17.220
next time, like, you know, or like when I feel anxiety, like knowing that I know that, it

01:42:17.220 --> 01:42:18.340
gives me something to think about.

01:42:18.420 --> 01:42:22.580
It's like, what is that thing out in the world that my brain is sort of latching onto?

01:42:22.740 --> 01:42:28.340
It's a way to sort of like step back from just experiencing the emotion to sort of, you

01:42:28.340 --> 01:42:31.860
know, it's sort of, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, but thinking about like what

01:42:31.940 --> 01:42:36.580
what it, you know, but it but it's a way to sort of armchair cognitive behavioral therapy

01:42:36.580 --> 01:42:39.380
yourself is to just have some functional theory of an emotion.

01:42:39.540 --> 01:42:41.460
I wonder, have people looked at that?

01:42:42.050 --> 01:42:44.210
I mean, maybe I I'm not too sure.

01:42:44.370 --> 01:42:46.770
I think um, you know, one that would work really well.

01:42:46.850 --> 01:42:52.690
Like Aaron Sell has done an excellent job of like decomposing anger and we talked about it

01:42:52.690 --> 01:42:52.930
in Uber.

01:42:53.170 --> 01:42:53.650
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:42:53.890 --> 01:42:54.050
Yeah.

01:42:54.130 --> 01:42:57.730
And I think that would be a great first place to start with that because I think, you know,

01:42:57.890 --> 01:43:01.570
because of him, like yeah, that's helped me like think about anger in an entirely different

01:43:01.570 --> 01:43:01.730
way.

01:43:01.810 --> 01:43:05.650
And I I think probably it would I could imagine that being useful in a therapeutic context,

01:43:05.730 --> 01:43:05.970
you know?

01:43:06.130 --> 01:43:06.450
Yeah.

01:43:06.700 --> 01:43:10.060
Um, just again understanding that and then being able to kind of think about because then

01:43:10.060 --> 01:43:12.140
you can think about, you can take that second perspective.

01:43:12.300 --> 01:43:16.540
You can provide the new inputs and say, well, I'm feeling this way probably because X, Y,

01:43:16.700 --> 01:43:19.180
Z, but really their behaviors were ABC.

01:43:19.260 --> 01:43:20.700
And so I shouldn't be feeling this way.

01:43:20.780 --> 01:43:20.940
Yeah.

01:43:21.100 --> 01:43:25.500
Um, and you can kind of begin to, I think, regulate those kinds of emotions.

01:43:25.660 --> 01:43:26.140
Yeah.

01:43:26.460 --> 01:43:31.260
One one easy question that probably a lot of you get asked a lot is like, how does somebody

01:43:31.260 --> 01:43:33.420
start studying morbid curiosity?

01:43:33.670 --> 01:43:35.990
Were you attacked by a clown as a child?

01:43:36.070 --> 01:43:37.990
Or or is No, no.

01:43:38.070 --> 01:43:41.590
I mean, I I've always kind of liked scary things, but I it's not like I went to school and

01:43:41.590 --> 01:43:46.710
I thought, okay, I'm gonna study, you know, why I'm interested in this and why why we love

01:43:46.710 --> 01:43:47.350
horror movies.

01:43:47.510 --> 01:43:52.630
When I when I was in grad school, I like most young fresh grad students, I was just

01:43:52.630 --> 01:43:53.590
interested in like everything.

01:43:53.750 --> 01:43:57.350
And and I still kind of am to some extent, but you know, you kind of have to pick a thing

01:43:57.420 --> 01:43:59.660
and uh and study it a little more deeply.

01:43:59.820 --> 01:44:02.940
And so I at first I got interested in why people were interested in violence.

01:44:03.100 --> 01:44:08.460
So why why do we have like in almost every society across the world throughout time,

01:44:08.940 --> 01:44:14.700
violence is mostly punished and abhorred, but there are certain cases where it's

01:44:14.940 --> 01:44:16.860
where it's okay and where it's celebrated.

01:44:17.100 --> 01:44:19.980
And so that was really interesting to me, like how we make this distinction between

01:44:19.980 --> 01:44:23.740
violence that's okay and violence that's not okay, because it seems like such a a thing

01:44:23.740 --> 01:44:26.750
that like should be so black and white, you know.

01:44:26.910 --> 01:44:30.830
Um, like if anything is black and white, like incredible violence or murdering someone,

01:44:30.910 --> 01:44:31.950
that that that should be it, right?

01:44:32.030 --> 01:44:32.990
But it's like, well, it depends.

01:44:33.070 --> 01:44:37.070
If it's in a Coliseum in front of 80,000 cheering Romans, maybe it's okay.

01:44:37.310 --> 01:44:40.030
So I was interested in why how we made those distinctions.

01:44:40.110 --> 01:44:44.350
And I did this eye tracking study to kind of see do people like look at the scenes

01:44:44.350 --> 01:44:44.670
differently?

01:44:44.750 --> 01:44:48.910
Do they describe them differently if it's violent or not violent or they're not sure?

01:44:49.150 --> 01:44:54.740
Um and then I started thinking, well, you know, it's kind of weird that we sometimes enjoy

01:44:54.740 --> 01:44:55.060
violence.

01:44:55.140 --> 01:44:57.220
It's we kind of scare our and violence can be scary.

01:44:57.300 --> 01:45:00.020
And like, well, we also kind of scare ourselves sometimes for fun.

01:45:00.100 --> 01:45:01.780
And then I was like, well, I do that too, right?

01:45:01.860 --> 01:45:03.860
Like, I also like scary things.

01:45:04.100 --> 01:45:08.420
Um, and so I started looking through the literature and I didn't really find any

01:45:09.700 --> 01:45:11.380
explanations for why we do that.

01:45:11.540 --> 01:45:14.340
Uh Matthias Clayson was the only one who'd really done any work on this.

01:45:14.500 --> 01:45:19.310
This was in like 2016 or so, 2017 maybe.

01:45:19.470 --> 01:45:23.710
Um yeah, I think Paul Bloom had some sort of like ideas, but I don't think he did much of

01:45:23.710 --> 01:45:23.950
the work.

01:45:24.030 --> 01:45:27.550
Yeah, I don't think there was no and there really wasn't much written about it even.

01:45:27.630 --> 01:45:31.390
I mean, you know, Pinker had like a line or two in his book on it or something, you know,

01:45:31.550 --> 01:45:37.460
on the blank slate, I think, or maybe the blank slate or maybe one of his other one of his

01:45:37.460 --> 01:45:39.060
other how the mind works or something.

01:45:39.460 --> 01:45:40.500
It may have been how the mind works.

01:45:40.580 --> 01:45:40.660
Yeah.

01:45:40.900 --> 01:45:45.060
And Paul Duman has some stuff like on his his psych book, which I use for my intro psych

01:45:45.140 --> 01:45:46.260
class, which is a great book, psych.

01:45:46.580 --> 01:45:47.460
It's like but uh but yeah.

01:45:47.860 --> 01:45:49.140
But that came out that came out much later.

01:45:49.380 --> 01:45:49.940
Very recently, yeah.

01:45:50.260 --> 01:45:50.660
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:50.900 --> 01:45:52.740
That came out like in the last two years, I think.

01:45:52.900 --> 01:45:54.900
This would have been like, you know, almost ten years ago now.

01:45:55.140 --> 01:45:55.540
No, for sure.

01:45:55.620 --> 01:45:55.860
Yeah, yeah.

01:45:56.100 --> 01:46:00.490
Um and there's nobody was doing it except this Danish literature scholar.

01:46:00.650 --> 01:46:04.970
And so I reached out to him and I because he was interested in like horror literature and

01:46:04.970 --> 01:46:07.530
like what makes horror literature horror literature.

01:46:07.770 --> 01:46:09.050
And um I reached out to him.

01:46:09.130 --> 01:46:12.570
I said, Hey, you're the only person I can find that is doing anything like this.

01:46:13.130 --> 01:46:14.650
Do you want to chat sometime?

01:46:14.890 --> 01:46:18.170
And so he's like, Yeah, well, in fact, I'm doing a haunted house study here in Denmark.

01:46:18.250 --> 01:46:21.100
Why don't you come over and and do it with me this fall.

01:46:21.180 --> 01:46:22.540
And I was like, okay.

01:46:22.780 --> 01:46:25.580
So I went to Denmark and I stayed there for about a month.

01:46:25.820 --> 01:46:30.140
And uh it was the start of a very long and fruitful collaboration with him.

01:46:30.300 --> 01:46:34.540
And this is before he'd even started the recreational fear lab, sort of properly.

01:46:34.780 --> 01:46:36.940
And um, yeah, so that's kind of how I got into it.

01:46:37.020 --> 01:46:39.260
And then, you know, I was talking to my advisor one day.

01:46:39.420 --> 01:46:43.740
I think I was probably a second year or something, and I was getting ready to sit down and

01:46:43.740 --> 01:46:46.630
sort of think about what I was going to do for my dissertation proposal.

01:46:46.710 --> 01:46:49.910
And I said, well, you know, Dario, I've got this project on violence.

01:46:49.990 --> 01:46:53.430
And I've got this project with the haunted house and fear and like why people are

01:46:53.430 --> 01:46:54.950
interested in scary things and violence.

01:46:55.030 --> 01:46:57.990
And he was like, well, it sounds kind of like morbid curiosity.

01:46:58.150 --> 01:46:59.670
And I was like, well, yeah, I guess that's right.

01:46:59.830 --> 01:47:02.790
And then I started looking up morbid curiosity and I was like, well, nobody's really done

01:47:02.790 --> 01:47:03.350
anything with this.

01:47:03.430 --> 01:47:05.910
Like there's no, there are no pay psychological papers on this.

01:47:05.990 --> 01:47:09.830
There was like one paper from the 80s that took a very narrow conception of what it might

01:47:09.830 --> 01:47:10.070
be.

01:47:10.230 --> 01:47:13.030
And then nobody ever validated the scale and it was barely cited.

01:47:13.110 --> 01:47:15.200
So I was like, nobody has really tackled this.

01:47:15.280 --> 01:47:18.000
And it's related to a lot of different things that I was doing.

01:47:18.240 --> 01:47:21.200
Um, I had that paper I mentioned earlier with Anne Fessler about gruesomeness.

01:47:21.360 --> 01:47:24.320
We had just kind of started that, like, why are people sometimes gruesomely violent?

01:47:24.480 --> 01:47:30.400
And so I just had all these topics that eventually became fitted to that broader

01:47:30.400 --> 01:47:31.280
concept.

01:47:31.680 --> 01:47:35.440
And it just ended up being then, you know, okay, well, I'll try to figure out what this if

01:47:35.440 --> 01:47:37.040
these are related in some kind of way.

01:47:37.670 --> 01:47:38.070
That's awesome.

01:47:38.630 --> 01:47:44.070
It's a great example of how an evolutionary perspective uh allows you to ask good

01:47:44.070 --> 01:47:49.030
questions uh and and discover low-hanging fruit that no one else has plucked.

01:47:49.190 --> 01:47:50.310
Like it's kind of crazy to me.

01:47:50.630 --> 01:47:55.030
You know, that you know, psychology has been around for what, more than a century now?

01:47:55.190 --> 01:48:01.140
Uh and uh and nobody uh has really looked at this huge aspect of the human experience,

01:48:01.220 --> 01:48:05.220
which is our fascination with the macabra and with darkness and violence.

01:48:05.380 --> 01:48:06.580
Like, that's crazy to me.

01:48:06.660 --> 01:48:07.700
Like it was crazy to me.

01:48:07.780 --> 01:48:08.340
I thought I was wrong.

01:48:08.420 --> 01:48:11.620
I thought I was like, Am I missing an entire portion of the literature that I'm just not,

01:48:11.700 --> 01:48:12.820
you know, seeing somewhere?

01:48:12.980 --> 01:48:16.500
But it was just that it was one of those things people just took for granted, I guess, or

01:48:16.660 --> 01:48:19.700
like, I don't know, one of those things it's like it's so obvious, let's not look into it,

01:48:19.860 --> 01:48:23.780
which tend to be the most fruitful areas for especially evolutionary psychology.

01:48:23.940 --> 01:48:29.710
Um, and and I get now, I mean, emails all the time from from like undergrads and

01:48:29.710 --> 01:48:32.990
now graduate students who are like, Well, I think I'm gonna do my thesis on this.

01:48:33.070 --> 01:48:33.790
I'm like, please do.

01:48:33.870 --> 01:48:35.470
There's like so much low-hanging fruit.

01:48:35.550 --> 01:48:38.030
Like, I can't I can't do it all myself at all.

01:48:38.190 --> 01:48:42.110
Like, there's so much just like simple questions, simple studies you could do that would be

01:48:42.110 --> 01:48:44.110
really impactful and really interesting.

01:48:44.350 --> 01:48:49.020
Um even with true crime, it was like I was blown away that like there was only like one

01:48:49.020 --> 01:48:51.900
empirical side paper on true crime when I started studying this.

01:48:51.980 --> 01:48:52.060
Right.

01:48:52.220 --> 01:48:53.180
It was like from 2013.

01:48:53.260 --> 01:48:53.660
It was one.

01:48:53.740 --> 01:48:55.100
It was really good, but there was only one.

01:48:55.260 --> 01:48:56.780
And it's like that is such a phenomenal.

01:48:56.860 --> 01:48:59.180
Like hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on this.

01:48:59.340 --> 01:49:01.420
And and hundreds of millions of people consume it.

01:49:01.500 --> 01:49:02.700
And like we don't understand why.

01:49:02.860 --> 01:49:03.180
You know.

01:49:03.420 --> 01:49:06.620
And I think it's just because people have these intuitions, like, oh, they do it because

01:49:07.020 --> 01:49:10.940
they glorify because they like to glorify violence or what the things that just are like a

01:49:10.940 --> 01:49:14.380
made-up, like made-up explanations that nobody has ever tested.

01:49:14.540 --> 01:49:18.150
Um, and it turns out when you start thinking about it a little more clearly and testing

01:49:18.150 --> 01:49:22.150
some of these ideas, you can come up with some really fascinating explanations that then

01:49:22.150 --> 01:49:24.710
can lead to, you know, uh a bunch of other insights.

01:49:25.030 --> 01:49:25.190
Right.

01:49:25.510 --> 01:49:26.630
Respect the phenomenon.

01:49:26.710 --> 01:49:26.870
Yeah.

01:49:27.270 --> 01:49:27.510
Totally.

01:49:28.150 --> 01:49:32.950
I mean, it's it's a it's you know, uh it it's a you know, it echoes what I said in uh an

01:49:32.950 --> 01:49:36.150
earlier episode we did on how to do good evolutionary psychology.

01:49:36.230 --> 01:49:39.990
I think that might have been it, where um, you know, a common criticism you hear about

01:49:39.990 --> 01:49:44.150
evolutionary psychology is that it tells just so stories and that they're untestable and

01:49:44.150 --> 01:49:47.900
there's no way to, you know, uh make predictions with an evolutionary perspective.

01:49:48.060 --> 01:49:52.540
And my experience actually being in the field and doing evolutionary psychology research is

01:49:52.540 --> 01:49:56.540
that I have the exact opposite problem, is that it makes too many predictions.

01:49:56.620 --> 01:49:58.540
And there are too many ways to test this.

01:49:58.620 --> 01:50:00.940
And I just there aren't enough hours in the day.

01:50:01.100 --> 01:50:05.900
I wish I had a whole army of researchers to go out and test these predictions, just so

01:50:05.900 --> 01:50:07.180
fruitful and so rich.

01:50:07.450 --> 01:50:11.610
And uh that that to me is more of the problem is that we just don't have enough resources

01:50:11.610 --> 01:50:13.690
to go out and test all these ideas.

01:50:13.850 --> 01:50:16.170
Um do you have you had a similar experience, Colton?

01:50:17.370 --> 01:50:18.010
Having it right now.

01:50:18.090 --> 01:50:21.770
I mean it's just like anyone uh anyone listening to this that wants to throw funding my

01:50:21.770 --> 01:50:27.290
way, I will uh do t I will I will multiply by five the number of experiments I'm currently

01:50:27.290 --> 01:50:27.610
running.

01:50:27.770 --> 01:50:30.330
Um yeah it's it's really just a time and money thing.

01:50:30.410 --> 01:50:35.540
It's not even I mean there's just so much interesting stuff or like you know finding people

01:50:35.700 --> 01:50:39.380
it's more fun to to do studies with in my opinion with other people it's like finding

01:50:39.380 --> 01:50:44.340
people who are also interested in this and um yeah I I've just it's it's really more of at

01:50:44.340 --> 01:50:50.180
least in in my narrow area that I work in uh at least that I primarily work in uh

01:50:50.340 --> 01:50:54.500
it's mostly just a time and resources thing not a not a failure of predictions not a

01:50:54.500 --> 01:50:59.650
failure of um not being able to come up with experiments to test it, you know.

01:51:00.130 --> 01:51:01.090
Um yeah.

01:51:01.250 --> 01:51:01.570
Yeah.

01:51:01.730 --> 01:51:06.930
The so uh the behavioral or the what what is the recreational the what is the recreational

01:51:07.090 --> 01:51:10.850
fear lab yeah the recreational fear okay you have to explain so that I'm can you explain

01:51:10.850 --> 01:51:15.730
that and then that's a lead into if people are interested in like your work what sure where

01:51:15.730 --> 01:51:20.450
can they come across this stuff and what what exists and are I know there's some uh things

01:51:20.450 --> 01:51:24.740
or events that are maybe planned too so can you talk a little bit about this yeah Yeah.

01:51:24.820 --> 01:51:30.820
So I mean, like I said, I I got hooked up with Matthias Clazen, who now is uh director of

01:51:30.820 --> 01:51:32.020
the Recreational Fear Lab.

01:51:32.260 --> 01:51:34.820
Um great name Recreational Fear Lab.

01:51:35.060 --> 01:51:38.660
So how can you not be curious about a lab called a Recreational Fear Lab?

01:51:39.620 --> 01:51:42.900
If you had just wear that as a t shirt, people will be like, What is that?

01:51:42.980 --> 01:51:43.140
Yeah.

01:51:43.380 --> 01:51:44.500
I think they do have T shirts.

01:51:44.580 --> 01:51:48.500
You might uh I I know I know I certainly have a hoodie with it on there, so I'm pretty sure

01:51:48.500 --> 01:51:49.380
they have t shirts.

01:51:50.090 --> 01:51:55.930
Um, yeah, so it's a it's a lab that Matias started to study in in Aarhus, Denmark, to uh

01:51:55.930 --> 01:51:59.370
study why and how we engage with scary play.

01:51:59.610 --> 01:52:03.610
And um, I've collaborated with them a lot over the years, more so in my PhD.

01:52:03.690 --> 01:52:07.210
I used to, I would go there, you know, for several weeks at a time, usually in October and

01:52:07.210 --> 01:52:08.650
do haunt studies in haunted houses.

01:52:08.730 --> 01:52:12.650
They were kind of these like ways for us to do field experiments on fear that in ways that

01:52:12.650 --> 01:52:16.330
you can't induce in the lab, ethically or even like practically.

01:52:16.490 --> 01:52:22.460
Um, and for us to get like really cool uh data, everything from physiology to eye tracking

01:52:22.460 --> 01:52:24.380
to hormones to whatever.

01:52:24.620 --> 01:52:27.100
Um so I worked with them for a long time.

01:52:27.260 --> 01:52:33.260
Um you know still am close with them but I'm not like officially uh affiliated with their

01:52:33.260 --> 01:52:33.580
lab.

01:52:33.980 --> 01:52:36.540
Um but yeah what were what were the other questions?

01:52:36.620 --> 01:52:38.940
I'm sorry I forgot oh just so where can they find my work?

01:52:39.100 --> 01:52:44.300
Yeah yeah yeah yeah um I mean my so my website if you just type in www.colton

01:52:44.460 --> 01:52:47.570
scrivener.com I've got all of my publications.

01:52:47.730 --> 01:52:50.690
As soon as they are available, I put them up as a PDF there.

01:52:50.930 --> 01:52:54.130
Um, there's a link to my Substack, so morbidly curious thoughts.

01:52:54.290 --> 01:52:58.930
This is kind of where I usually so I actually, this paper I mentioned earlier with Edgar

01:52:58.930 --> 01:53:04.050
about formidability and horror, the horror genre started as a Substack post that I posted a

01:53:04.050 --> 01:53:05.010
while back.

01:53:05.330 --> 01:53:06.210
And Edgar read it.

01:53:06.370 --> 01:53:07.650
He's like, hey, we should do a study on this.

01:53:07.730 --> 01:53:09.490
And I was like, I would love to, you know.

01:53:09.650 --> 01:53:14.060
Uh and it ended up being like one of my favorite papers that I've ever worked on because it

01:53:14.060 --> 01:53:17.020
just came from this this idea that I had that I got to write about.

01:53:17.180 --> 01:53:21.580
So on my sub stack, I write about things like that that like, oh, this is like kind of an

01:53:21.580 --> 01:53:24.940
interesting, cool idea or something I've been thinking about, but it's not something

01:53:24.940 --> 01:53:26.220
usually that I've published about.

01:53:26.460 --> 01:53:30.060
Or if I have, I take the thing I published about and I kind of expand it and and think

01:53:30.060 --> 01:53:33.340
about it a little more freely than you can in in an academic paper.

01:53:33.580 --> 01:53:39.420
Um, and then of course I have a book out on October 7th today, um, called

01:53:39.450 --> 01:53:42.490
Morbidly Curious, Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away.

01:53:42.970 --> 01:53:48.810
And it is uh a very it's it's an interesting book because it's it's very much a popular

01:53:48.810 --> 01:53:49.370
science book.

01:53:49.450 --> 01:53:53.290
You can read it without having any kind of special degree or anything like that.

01:53:53.610 --> 01:53:59.450
Um, but there's a lot of stuff in it that even people who study topics very

01:53:59.450 --> 01:54:03.930
similar to mine will have not seen before because I I was able to treat it as kind of an

01:54:03.930 --> 01:54:07.690
exploration, almost like my sub stack, like an exploration of lots of ideas that I've been

01:54:07.690 --> 01:54:13.460
thinking about and tying all those ideas, many of them that are not in academic papers yet,

01:54:13.780 --> 01:54:19.700
um, tying them together to this sort of more general core theory of of why we're intrigued

01:54:19.700 --> 01:54:20.740
by the macabre.

01:54:21.060 --> 01:54:25.540
Um so there's a lot of like new stuff in there if you're a scientist, but also uh very

01:54:25.780 --> 01:54:29.220
should be very easily accessible to to anyone.

01:54:29.460 --> 01:54:31.230
Um but yeah, cool.

01:54:31.470 --> 01:54:32.910
It's uh it's a it's a wonderful book.

01:54:32.990 --> 01:54:36.750
I was fortunate enough to um read an advanced copy of it.

01:54:36.910 --> 01:54:41.470
Um it's really readable, enjoyable, lots of fun examples from pop culture and also lots of

01:54:41.470 --> 01:54:42.910
really good science as well.

01:54:43.070 --> 01:54:46.350
So I I recommend everyone who's listening to to pick up a copy.

01:54:46.670 --> 01:54:46.990
Thank you.

01:54:47.150 --> 01:54:47.710
That means a lot.

01:54:47.790 --> 01:54:51.870
It was uh first it was it was it was weird getting I never thought, not that I never

01:54:51.870 --> 01:54:55.150
thought I'd write a book, but I certainly didn't think I'd write one this soon, you know.

01:54:55.390 --> 01:54:59.560
Um and I was kind of scared at first to do it because it was like again, a lot of these

01:54:59.560 --> 01:55:00.760
ideas I had not published on yet.

01:55:00.840 --> 01:55:04.280
And you're kind of taught in science, like if you if there's not, you know, published

01:55:04.280 --> 01:55:06.280
papers for this, you can't talk about it.

01:55:06.520 --> 01:55:11.800
Um, it was cool to kind of like mix like here's like what I have empirical evidence for,

01:55:11.880 --> 01:55:15.080
and then here's all these fun ideas that I'm I'm pretty sure about, but I haven't done the

01:55:15.080 --> 01:55:15.560
studies yet.

01:55:15.720 --> 01:55:20.850
Again, because not because of a lack of uh ability to come up with experiments or or have

01:55:20.850 --> 01:55:23.890
testable predictions, but just time and resources.

01:55:23.970 --> 01:55:28.210
And uh yeah, if you do read it and there's fun ideas in there, please do those studies.

01:55:28.370 --> 01:55:28.450
Yeah.

01:55:29.010 --> 01:55:30.050
Please feel free.

01:55:30.450 --> 01:55:34.690
We we've talked to a lot of uh evolutionary behavioral scientists, and I think almost every

01:55:34.690 --> 01:55:40.610
single one, um, with there are exceptions, but almost every single one sort of found it by

01:55:40.610 --> 01:55:41.490
reading a book.

01:55:41.860 --> 01:55:44.500
Like it wasn't by reading, like almost always like a book.

01:55:44.660 --> 01:55:48.500
Like there's something about books that I think, you know, it really like it changes

01:55:48.500 --> 01:55:49.140
people's lives.

01:55:49.220 --> 01:55:52.980
So, you know, like there's just something about like the whole package of ideas that really

01:55:52.980 --> 01:55:53.620
gets people.

01:55:53.700 --> 01:55:57.940
And I've heard that um, you know, many people talk about it was a book that really changed

01:55:57.940 --> 01:55:58.740
the course of my life.

01:55:58.820 --> 01:55:59.220
So yeah.

01:55:59.460 --> 01:55:59.620
Yeah.

01:55:59.700 --> 01:55:59.860
Yeah.

01:55:59.940 --> 01:56:04.510
I mean, uh I, you know, I I read when I was uh an undergraduate why zebras don't get

01:56:04.590 --> 01:56:04.910
ulcers.

01:56:04.990 --> 01:56:08.350
And that was like my book where it just opened my eyes by Rob Robert Sapolski.

01:56:08.510 --> 01:56:08.590
Yeah.

01:56:08.750 --> 01:56:14.510
Just opened my eyes to this like new way to think about human

01:56:14.670 --> 01:56:16.030
existence just generally.

01:56:16.190 --> 01:56:16.350
Right.

01:56:16.830 --> 01:56:18.750
Um, and so that was like super influential.

01:56:18.830 --> 01:56:22.510
And I came from again, like you said, a book where he, you know, talked about he's he

01:56:22.510 --> 01:56:23.470
certainly cites the sources.

01:56:23.550 --> 01:56:27.150
He has a lot of sources he cites, but he, you know, takes some some creative liberty to

01:56:27.150 --> 01:56:28.510
think about new ideas in it.

01:56:28.670 --> 01:56:32.780
And I think those are some of the more enriching, interesting places because you really

01:56:32.780 --> 01:56:37.820
have freedom as a as an author to I guess think out loud in some ways.

01:56:37.980 --> 01:56:38.140
Yeah.

01:56:38.300 --> 01:56:41.260
Or think think along with your audio, with your audience, with your readers.

01:56:41.340 --> 01:56:41.500
Yeah.

01:56:41.740 --> 01:56:45.580
That you just don't get to do in in academic papers, or it's or it's relegated to like one

01:56:45.580 --> 01:56:47.020
sentence in the discussion.

01:56:47.420 --> 01:56:47.740
Right.

01:56:47.900 --> 01:56:49.100
Thanks to reviewer two.

01:56:49.340 --> 01:56:51.500
I can speculate about this at a footnote.

01:56:52.140 --> 01:56:53.100
Yeah, it's at a footnote.

01:56:53.180 --> 01:56:53.660
That's more likely.

01:56:53.900 --> 01:56:54.140
Exactly.

01:56:54.220 --> 01:56:54.620
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:56:54.940 --> 01:56:57.340
Um, is there anything we should have asked you?

01:56:59.890 --> 01:57:01.810
Um should have asked me.

01:57:01.890 --> 01:57:02.210
I don't know.

01:57:02.370 --> 01:57:06.850
I mean, uh, I think you asked me this is one of the more uh fun conversations that I've

01:57:06.850 --> 01:57:11.810
had, I think, because both of you are evolutionary psychologists and I don't often uh do I

01:57:11.810 --> 01:57:15.810
do I do lots of podcasts, but I don't often do podcasts with evolutionary psychologists uh

01:57:15.810 --> 01:57:16.530
in discussion.

01:57:16.690 --> 01:57:21.330
And so um it was really fun to like break some of these ideas down in ways that you know I

01:57:21.330 --> 01:57:25.540
just haven't been able to do with with other other Yeah, I appreciate that.

01:57:25.620 --> 01:57:26.820
I mean, that's one of the reasons why we're doing it.

01:57:26.980 --> 01:57:30.580
Just, you know, it's just it's that's kind of what we're doing, you know, it's just get

01:57:30.740 --> 01:57:34.100
people a a a sense of what it's like if we were just all chatting together about what we

01:57:34.100 --> 01:57:34.580
do, you know.

01:57:34.660 --> 01:57:35.540
Like that's yeah.

01:57:35.700 --> 01:57:38.980
And I think I think evolutionary psychology is especially interesting in that way because

01:57:38.980 --> 01:57:42.500
it's like sitting around with an engineer and having them think about like exactly how do

01:57:42.500 --> 01:57:44.740
we take this apart and like how do you know this works this way?

01:57:44.900 --> 01:57:44.980
Yeah.

01:57:45.140 --> 01:57:46.740
And we do the same thing but with the mind, right?

01:57:46.820 --> 01:57:49.710
And so it's like a very different way to sit around and just chat.

01:57:50.030 --> 01:57:54.190
It's very conducive to interesting discussions, I think, and generative, as David mentioned

01:57:54.190 --> 01:57:54.510
earlier.

01:57:54.670 --> 01:57:59.310
Like super can be super generative if you do it correctly and carefully and thoughtfully.

01:57:59.630 --> 01:57:59.870
Yeah.

01:57:59.950 --> 01:58:01.550
And it's just super cool.

01:58:01.710 --> 01:58:03.790
Uh I love that you're doing.

01:58:03.950 --> 01:58:06.750
I think like, you know, David's doing stuff about humor.

01:58:06.830 --> 01:58:09.950
We we had recorded recently the his about humor.

01:58:10.190 --> 01:58:11.150
I love that.

01:58:11.390 --> 01:58:14.020
You know, I I I study groups in conflict.

01:58:14.100 --> 01:58:14.980
You know, David does that too.

01:58:15.060 --> 01:58:19.700
But like I think it's it's really important to stick to like foraging and mating and you

01:58:19.700 --> 01:58:20.580
know, survival.

01:58:20.660 --> 01:58:24.100
And even like I think there's still low-hanging fruit for even like stuff like parenting.

01:58:24.340 --> 01:58:30.020
But I also really like that there's good quality work getting into these more sort of

01:58:30.340 --> 01:58:33.940
more strange uh and less straightforward areas.

01:58:34.180 --> 01:58:34.340
Yeah.

01:58:34.580 --> 01:58:40.170
Um, and I'm really happy just as sort of like a watching the field

01:58:40.170 --> 01:58:44.170
grow that these things like humor or horror.

01:58:44.410 --> 01:58:49.130
Um, it's not just sort of like as we said, like bad or joking, like you know, ridiculous

01:58:49.210 --> 01:58:53.690
bad, just so stories, but it's actually starting to get empirical teeth and like

01:58:53.690 --> 01:58:56.890
sophisticated cognitive science basically of these things.

01:58:56.970 --> 01:58:58.170
And I just love that.

01:58:58.340 --> 01:59:03.460
Um, I'm always happy when somebody is like biting off like the serious cognitive science of

01:59:03.460 --> 01:59:04.260
like a new area.

01:59:04.340 --> 01:59:06.740
And it's it's so thank you for doing that with this.

01:59:06.820 --> 01:59:07.060
Yeah.

01:59:07.300 --> 01:59:11.620
No, I mean, just you know, honestly, just kind of following what interested me, um, which

01:59:11.620 --> 01:59:15.140
is not always good advice, but I got lucky and it ended up being good advice for me.

01:59:15.380 --> 01:59:21.130
And uh, I think I'm I'm pretty fortunate that I'm I study I study something that

01:59:21.210 --> 01:59:25.370
um pretty much everyone has an opinion on and has experienced.

01:59:25.530 --> 01:59:30.170
And like it's easy for me to talk to someone at a as easy for me to talk to you guys, like

01:59:30.250 --> 01:59:35.210
you know, high-quality evolutionary psychologists in the field about this topic as it is

01:59:35.210 --> 01:59:37.770
for me to talk about like some stranger at a bar about this topic.

01:59:37.850 --> 01:59:42.380
And it's like everyone has experienced feeling morbidly curious at one time or another.

01:59:42.460 --> 01:59:45.260
Everyone either usually loves or hates horror movies.

01:59:45.340 --> 01:59:49.740
Um, and so they have a lot of thoughts about why that is and uh have experiences with it.

01:59:49.820 --> 01:59:54.540
And so it's very easy to connect like this topic with just like grounded real things that

01:59:54.540 --> 01:59:55.340
people experience.

01:59:55.500 --> 01:59:59.820
And I think it's easy for like us to sit around and think about certain topics that are

01:59:59.820 --> 02:00:04.780
super interesting, but maybe don't feel relevant on their face to the average person.

02:00:04.940 --> 02:00:09.090
But I think I'm I'm lucky that I think my topic is not so much like that.

02:00:09.250 --> 02:00:15.090
Um, so it's super fun to to study because people I think can can access it quickly and

02:00:15.090 --> 02:00:19.810
have um, you know, uh in some in some cases, very generative thoughts about it.

02:00:19.890 --> 02:00:25.410
Like I said, the uh the whole idea about horror maybe being beneficial came from just

02:00:25.410 --> 02:00:29.680
regular people, like non-scientists, talking about how they engage with it and what it

02:00:29.680 --> 02:00:29.840
does.

02:00:29.920 --> 02:00:31.520
Like that's where that idea came from.

02:00:31.760 --> 02:00:32.080
Yeah.

02:00:32.160 --> 02:00:32.400
Yeah.

02:00:32.480 --> 02:00:37.040
It's not, I mean, one of the themes of this podcast has been respecting people and not just

02:00:37.040 --> 02:00:41.600
sort of patronizing toward it in something like consuming horror, people who are anxious.

02:00:41.680 --> 02:00:44.720
It's really easy to just sort of or glorifying violence, right?

02:00:44.800 --> 02:00:49.680
It's just really easy to just sort of judge that and sort of treat it as like not worth our

02:00:49.680 --> 02:00:50.400
attention.

02:00:50.560 --> 02:00:52.800
Um, and I think that's exactly right.

02:00:52.960 --> 02:00:55.120
That that's exactly the wrong way to think about it.

02:00:55.290 --> 02:00:55.530
Yeah.

02:00:55.690 --> 02:00:55.930
Yeah.

02:00:56.090 --> 02:00:56.250
Yeah.

02:00:56.730 --> 02:01:02.010
I I I will say your your work has uh shaped my life uh personally in terms of my

02:01:02.010 --> 02:01:05.610
relationship with my daughter, who as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode is very

02:01:05.610 --> 02:01:07.450
morbidly curious.

02:01:07.610 --> 02:01:13.130
Um I I had an experience um a few nights ago where I I wanted to uh I was gonna watch James

02:01:13.130 --> 02:01:14.250
and the giant peach with her.

02:01:14.330 --> 02:01:18.460
So I I went into you know the Apple TV and typed in J A.

02:01:18.940 --> 02:01:24.460
And then the poster for Jaws came up with like the picture of of like the shark's mouth

02:01:24.460 --> 02:01:24.700
open.

02:01:24.780 --> 02:01:25.020
Yeah.

02:01:25.180 --> 02:01:27.980
And as soon as my daughter saw that, she's oh, I want to watch the shark movie.

02:01:28.060 --> 02:01:29.740
We watched the shark movie instead.

02:01:29.980 --> 02:01:33.500
And I had this like inner so she my daughter's three, she's three years old.

02:01:33.580 --> 02:01:36.220
And so I had this inner debate with myself, like, oh, is that shit?

02:01:36.860 --> 02:01:37.900
Should I watch Jaws?

02:01:38.220 --> 02:01:39.820
Like, is that gonna be too much for her?

02:01:40.060 --> 02:01:43.810
And then I had my inner Colton Scrivener telling me, Hey, you know what?

02:01:43.970 --> 02:01:48.290
This is actually a normal, healthy part of development that she's curious about this.

02:01:48.450 --> 02:01:49.570
Um, let's give it a try.

02:01:49.730 --> 02:01:51.170
If it's too much, we can always turn it off.

02:01:51.890 --> 02:01:54.770
And I ended up and I ended up watching Jaws with her.

02:01:54.930 --> 02:01:57.090
And she was she's so into it.

02:01:57.170 --> 02:01:57.890
She loved it.

02:01:57.970 --> 02:01:58.930
And I it was funny.

02:01:59.090 --> 02:02:01.250
I was actually more scared than she was.

02:02:01.970 --> 02:02:03.970
She was just more kind of like riveted and curious.

02:02:04.130 --> 02:02:06.050
She was like asking all these questions about it.

02:02:06.530 --> 02:02:10.500
Um, and uh it was just like a really cool bonding experience.

02:02:10.660 --> 02:02:16.020
Um and I I appreciate you, you know, um allowing that to happen with me.

02:02:16.100 --> 02:02:20.420
And I'm sure I'll continue to enjoy, you know, horror movies with her and morbid curiosity

02:02:20.420 --> 02:02:21.700
with her as she grows up.

02:02:21.780 --> 02:02:25.860
Um and it's that's just been a really cool and special way that your work has affected my

02:02:25.860 --> 02:02:26.100
life.

02:02:26.260 --> 02:02:27.940
So I appreciate that actually means a lot.

02:02:28.020 --> 02:02:29.940
That's uh that's good to hear and that means a lot.

02:02:30.020 --> 02:02:33.730
And I think like it would have been a different experience if she had come across it

02:02:33.730 --> 02:02:38.050
herself and watched it and might have been afraid and not been able to like have you next.

02:02:38.130 --> 02:02:40.370
Like having her father next to her is a very comfort.

02:02:40.450 --> 02:02:42.210
That's a comforting thing for a primate, right?

02:02:42.370 --> 02:02:42.610
Yeah.

02:02:42.770 --> 02:02:48.690
Uh and so I think it it also allows them you to tackle things that are maybe would it would

02:02:48.690 --> 02:02:51.650
have been a little more a little too scary for you initially, but now because you feel like

02:02:51.650 --> 02:02:53.890
you're in a secure spot, you can actually engage with them.

02:02:54.220 --> 02:02:54.460
Yeah.

02:02:54.700 --> 02:02:59.100
And maybe things that would have scared her, she's more willing to go to you with them.

02:02:59.180 --> 02:02:59.260
Yeah.

02:02:59.420 --> 02:03:00.860
As opposed to yeah, exactly.

02:03:01.260 --> 02:03:01.740
Exactly.

02:03:01.900 --> 02:03:02.140
Yeah.

02:03:02.460 --> 02:03:02.700
Cool.

02:03:02.780 --> 02:03:03.660
I love that.

02:03:03.820 --> 02:03:04.220
Yeah.

02:03:04.460 --> 02:03:05.100
Awesome.

02:03:05.260 --> 02:03:08.220
Well, uh well, Colton, thank you so much for being with us.

02:03:08.380 --> 02:03:13.340
Uh really uh it's it's really just a fun, fun topic.

02:03:13.500 --> 02:03:17.900
And um I hope everybody has a good Halloween season here in October.

02:03:18.140 --> 02:03:18.460
Yeah.

02:03:18.540 --> 02:03:19.340
Thanks for having me on.

02:03:19.420 --> 02:03:20.140
It was a blast.

02:03:20.350 --> 02:03:21.790
Work on your costumes.

02:03:22.910 --> 02:03:24.270
If you're gonna make them.

02:03:24.430 --> 02:03:30.190
Uh uh, I've uh uh as a parent like spent a lot of time like last minute like

02:03:30.350 --> 02:03:31.470
creating a costume.

02:03:31.630 --> 02:03:34.590
Um so you know if you're gonna make it start now.

02:03:35.070 --> 02:03:36.270
That's my PSA.

02:03:38.990 --> 02:03:39.630
David.

02:03:40.510 --> 02:03:41.550
Well, we can end there.

02:03:41.710 --> 02:03:42.190
Okay, yeah.

02:03:43.470 --> 02:03:44.030
Thank you so much.

02:03:44.110 --> 02:03:45.150
This was fantastic.

02:03:45.470 --> 02:03:46.910
Yeah, this is super fun, really.

02:03:46.990 --> 02:03:49.310
Like one of the more fun uh discussions I've had with it.

02:03:49.390 --> 02:03:50.320
So cool.

02:03:50.400 --> 02:03:50.880
That's awesome.

02:03:50.960 --> 02:03:53.200
Yeah, no, we have we have a lot of fun uh typing.

02:03:56.800 --> 02:04:02.720
So David, we just uh spent another couple hours together with a guest and uh that

02:04:02.720 --> 02:04:04.160
was a really fun episode.

02:04:04.320 --> 02:04:06.400
Um and I'm looking forward to the next one.

02:04:06.480 --> 02:04:09.840
I don't even know what the next one's gonna be because we haven't done it yet.

02:04:10.150 --> 02:04:11.110
Yeah, I don't know either.

02:04:11.350 --> 02:04:13.190
Could be could be Jordan Peterson.

02:04:13.510 --> 02:04:17.030
Could be uh Don't David, don't debase yourself like that.

02:04:17.190 --> 02:04:17.830
Come on.

02:04:18.150 --> 02:04:20.150
No, it could be could be Lita Cosby.

02:04:20.390 --> 02:04:21.670
Or could it could be a solo episode.

02:04:21.830 --> 02:04:22.310
Who knows?

02:04:22.550 --> 02:04:22.710
Yeah.

02:04:22.950 --> 02:04:23.910
Maybe just you and me.

02:04:24.150 --> 02:04:24.630
Yeah.

02:04:24.870 --> 02:04:26.790
That that could be scary.

02:04:27.030 --> 02:04:31.670
Yeah, that would be uh uh it would take the the frights to a whole another level.

02:04:31.880 --> 02:04:32.200
Yeah.

02:04:32.280 --> 02:04:35.080
Um anyway, but uh but thank you for listening.

02:04:35.160 --> 02:04:41.160
And David, what can people do to support the podcast um materially or

02:04:41.480 --> 02:04:42.680
existentially?

02:04:42.840 --> 02:04:47.320
Um well, they can write us a kind review.

02:04:47.480 --> 02:04:53.000
Uh they can support us on Patreon, they can say, hey, this podcast is

02:04:53.000 --> 02:04:56.840
awesome on social media, but only if you truly believe that the podcast is awesome.

02:04:56.920 --> 02:04:58.950
We don't want you to lie on our behalf.

02:04:59.190 --> 02:05:03.430
So maybe that's the existentially relevant thing they can do is you can uh you think about

02:05:03.430 --> 02:05:07.990
whether you actually do like this podcast and whether it's serving a uh a greater purpose.

02:05:08.150 --> 02:05:13.910
And if so, uh maybe think about what your role to play is in that existential project

02:05:14.230 --> 02:05:16.710
of spreading knowledge and wisdom about humanity.

02:05:17.430 --> 02:05:19.350
This is a really grand uh outro.

02:05:19.430 --> 02:05:20.070
I like this.

02:05:20.240 --> 02:05:22.240
I feel like we should have some background music.

02:05:22.480 --> 02:05:25.120
Maybe if you write some inspiring orchestra music.

02:05:25.440 --> 02:05:27.760
Yeah, should we play John Williams in the in the background of this part?

02:05:28.320 --> 02:05:28.640
Yeah.

02:05:28.800 --> 02:05:31.200
Um, but uh, but yeah, but thank you for listening.

02:05:31.280 --> 02:05:37.200
And yeah, please uh keep listening and uh please like and subscribe and uh and tell a

02:05:37.200 --> 02:05:40.240
friend or an enemy or a neutral third party.

02:05:40.480 --> 02:05:44.320
Or just randomly talk, shout at somebody in the street, just say Yeah, maybe if you if you

02:05:44.320 --> 02:05:45.600
don't like it, that's something you could do.

02:05:45.680 --> 02:05:49.250
Maybe tell your enemy to listen to it and then it's really great because then you'll waste

02:05:49.250 --> 02:05:50.050
your enemy's time.

02:05:50.130 --> 02:05:51.490
So that way every everybody wins.

02:05:51.730 --> 02:05:52.370
It's like trans.

02:05:52.610 --> 02:05:53.250
Oh that's interesting.

02:05:53.410 --> 02:05:56.370
Okay we might have to sketch that out later a little later date.

02:05:56.530 --> 02:06:00.290
Okay uh thanks again uh take care everybody see you next week yep