Most people totally switch mental gears when someone starts crying.
You might feel like you need to go into problem solving mode to make them stop,
or maybe you find your own aggression easing up
and you instinctively want to treat them better.
And that’s because crying manipulates us physiologically.
Tears are a literal mind trick.
But only if they’re authentic, because your brain
responds totally different when they’re fake.
So here’s what happens to you when you hear, see, or smell someone crying.
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Babies are master manipulators, urging something deep
within you to care for them non-stop.
If only they could do it using their adorable laughs instead of their constant crying.
But before you jump to the comments, I know.
Technically, babies can’t cry cry for at least a while,
because it takes them a few weeks to produce tears.
But just the visual of an infant’s face when they’re crying
is enough to produce a specific response in your brain.
And it’s different from what happens when you see a teary eyed adult.
For this revelation, we turn to a study from The Netherlands and Italy
that compared how women who didn’t have kids
responded to looking at pictures of tearful infants versus adults.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI data,
to peek into the mind of the person witnessing the weeping.
And they found that infant tears created a stronger response than adult tears.
Now here’s what I mean by “stronger response.”
Since the participants were looking at pictures of criers,
the parts of their brains devoted to processing visual images were generally active.
And when the participants looked at infant pictures,
those regions were even more active.
So the researchers suggested that you take
more notice of crying babies than crying adults.
And on top of that, images of infant tears activated the participants’
somatosensory cortex, which you use to process physical stuff like pain.
That’s a feely part of the brain, rather than a thinky part.
It’s the part that may be inspiring you to do
what you can to make the tears stop because they hurt you.
And that’s above and beyond the piercing screams.
A baby’s cries are powerful enough to strike terror
into anyone about to board a transcontinental flight.
And evolutionarily, that makes a lot of sense.
Infants need you to help them out.
Just like evolutionarily, someone who’s losing a fight needs it to end.
And it turns out tears can help with that too.
As amazing as it is that the mere sight of tears can affect us,
the smell of them can do the same thing.
One peer-reviewed study from universities in Israel and the US
concluded that sniffing someone else’s tears
can cut your aggression by almost half.
At least under certain conditions.
These scientists had women collect the tears right off of their own cheeks
when they were watching sad movie scenes.
The tears were compared against salt-water
that had rolled down the same cheeks.
Just another day at the office I guess.
Then, they asked male participants to enter an MRI scanner
to see how their brains responded to either the real tears
or fake tears while performing an aggression assessment.
And yes, you heard me right.
The tears all came from women and the people in the MRI scanner
getting tested for aggression were all men.
I guess nice job reinforcing gender stereotypes, scientists.
But let’s keep that study limitation in our back pocket.
So back to this aggression test.
After the participants cozied on up into the MRI scanner,
the researchers had them play a competitive online money-based game.
The researchers also told them their opponent
would be another human, but that was a lie.
They were really playing against an algorithm designed to
play unfairly and even take money from the player from time to time.
Which is something that could definitely rile someone up.
But rather than waiting for an inevitable table flip, the researchers measured
aggression by quantifying how much revenge the participants took in the game.
Specifically, they could choose to deduct money from their made up opponent’s pot
even though they wouldn’t gain anything from it.
They just didn’t want the rude algorithm,
which they didn’t know wasn’t another human, to get that dough.
By comparing the total number of times that a player chose
to deduct their opponent’s winnings, against the total number of times the algorithm
provoked the player, the researchers could calculate a player’s “aggression metric”.
And the aggression metrics for the men who smelled the real tears were,
on average, a whopping 43.7% lower than the
aggression metrics for the fake tear group.
Which, I mean, I don’t know if we can just use that result to say that
smelling someone’s tears makes you less aggressive in general.
But we haven’t gotten to the MRI of it all, yet.
Since the players were in a big scanner the whole time,
scientists could continuously monitor how their brains responded to tears,
and how those tears may have triggered or suppressed aggression.
And they found that when these participants sniffed real tears,
the smell part of their brains was sending more signals to the amygdala,
which helps regulate aggression, and telling it to calm down.
But we can get even more specific than that.
These scientists also put a bunch of cells in a dish and covered them in tears
to see what allows tears to initiate sending a big “cease and desist” letter.
They tested 62 different smell receptors for their response to tears,
and found four that were super sensitive.
So yeah. You might not think that tears have a smell to them.
But your brain appears to use the same region to process odors as it does tears.
And a selection of those odor receptors are pen pals with the cells in
a different region of the brain associated with aggression.
Now, does this mean that I should spike my friend’s reed diffuser
with a bunch of tears when I go over for a board game night
so that we can avoid having to deal with his combative cousin?
Well, it couldn’t hurt. But I think we might need to wait for some follow-up research.
So tears manipulate us in a number of ways.
But they don’t just stop negative responses.
They also promote positive ones.
A study from New York University and Harvard Medical School
found that you trust people more when you see tears running down their face.
And again, the researchers reached these conclusions
by asking people to play games.
Who knew crying studies were so much fun?!
In the first game, you’re a merchant in a world
where 10 cents is actually worth something.
Because you have 10 cents and you need to choose
whether or not to invest it in a farmer who will use that money to grow food,
and who might bring the food back for you to sell at a profit.
So you have three potential outcomes.
If you don’t invest in the farmer, you’ll end the game with 10 cents.
If you invest in the farmer and they
give you their output to sell, you’ll have 15 cents.
But if you invest in the farmer and never see them again, you get nothing.
Now that I’ve explained it, that doesn’t really
sound like a very fun game, but still better than Monopoly.
Now, the farmer in question wasn’t some faceless entity.
In fact, their face was super important here.
Because the participants in this study had to watch silent videos
of a person with a neutral face that either had tears flowing down it or didn’t.
And they were told that that was their farmer.
And in the end, more people chose to invest
in the crying farmer than the stoic farmer.
To extract a little more nuance out of that result,
the researchers also had the participants rate the farmer
on a few different factors.
And crying farmers were rated as more sad, which makes a lot of sense,
but also more trustworthy, which is a little odd.
And the investments were more correlated with trustworthiness than sadness.
But trustworthiness is kind of a weird thing to associate with tears.
So they ran another experiment to see if
maybe they just felt bad for the crying farmers.
In another version of this game-that’s-not-really-a-game,
you’re an allocator of funds instead of an investor.
So you have to give up the money.
It’s just a matter of who you give it to.
And instead of potentially making either 15 cents or zero,
you know you won’t make anything.
So this game is more of a test of altruism than the first one.
But this time around, tears didn’t have a significant effect on
someone’s choice to allocate funds.
Players generally allocated the same amount
of money to both criers and non-criers.
So in this second scenario, where there’s no chance for
the player to see a payout, the trustworthiness rating wasn’t correlated with tears.
In other words, tears don’t seem to have a generally altruistic effect on you.
Context matters, and that context includes the
exact kind of relationship you have with a person.
Now, after hearing about all these ways that crying can be used to
manipulate people, you might be worried that
someone’s going to use that power against you.
But it turns out you can’t force these benefits
because many people can tell fake crying from a mile away.
According to a study from Portugal and the UK,
our brains respond differently to authentic vs. acted blubbering.
First, they collected audio samples from people either recalling
upsetting events and authentically crying,
or cry-acting with full control of their faculties.
Then, they monitored people’s brains while they listened to
those crying recordings through headphones.
But instead of MRI scanners like we mentioned earlier,
these researchers used electroencephalograms, or EEGs,
to see what was going on in their heads.
EEGs give the researchers different readouts
based on the electrical activity in your brain.
And in this study, when the researchers looked at a general brain response,
authentic crying produced much larger output than fake crying.
But there was also a kind of phony-meter signature
that was way bigger for fake cries.
Now, just because an EEG can pick up the difference doesn’t necessarily
mean your conscious mind can listen to someone’s cries
and confidently proclaim “Liar liar pants on fire!”.
But if you trust yourself to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not,
your brain can help steer you in the right direction.
It can process the sight of an infant crying and turn you into a protector.
And it can evaluate the sight or smell of someone breaking down
in front of you and make you more relaxed and trusting to help them.
But your natural instincts won’t let liars
manipulate you with the sounds of tearful deception.
So I guess tears work for good, not evil.
This video isn’t a sob story after all!
Now if you want to keep learning about crying, aggression, trust,
and other wonders of the human psyche,
you can check out the Study Hall channel right here on YouTube!
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Check out the link in the description or go to GoStudyHall.com
to learn more and thanks for learning with us here at Complexly.
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